About

Hi, I'm Pavel 👋 I build web products and strong engineering teams. Code or people? Can't decide what I love more, so keep doing both.

Launched my first website when I was 16 and I've been hooked ever since. There's something magical about bringing ideas to their digital life and that joy still fuels me today.

Originally from Belarus, I switched my hometown of Minsk for Norway's fjords in early 2021. One day I hope to return back (you can probably guess why I haven't booked a ticket yet). For now I'm enjoying life in Norway's picturesque surroundings and pretending I enjoy the cold.

Work

You can check out my professional journey on LinkedIn. Started as an engineer, eventually stepped into management. Turns out, helping people grow and building teams can be just as fun as building products. And, well… sometimes if you want things done right, you just have to do it yourself.

As an engineer, I worked my way up to senior roles (tech lead / solution architect), tackling everything from frontend/mobile to backend and infrastructure. As a manager, I've mentored engineers at different ages and career stages — helping them grow further and (hopefully) make fewer questionable decisions than I did back in the day.

Currently, I'm an Engineering Manager at Tribia, doing my best to make engineering feel like a craft rather than just a job. Building a space where engineers can experiment, learn and grow. I've had a chance to lead a couple of key initiatives here (like SaaS, Platform, IAM/SSO, Notification Engine) and helped steering the engineering ship through the exciting (and often challenging) waters of a fast-growing scaleup.

I enjoy automating anything that stands still for too long. At Tribia, that meant setting up CI/CD pipelines for 100+ repos, introducing IaaC for Auth0 and Keycloak, adopting feature toggling, trunk-based development and NewRelic monitoring - although I've also introduced a few heavy bills along the way! Proudest moment? Helping Tribia to escape the dark ages of manual Windows VM deployments and move into the bright and shiny world of cloud-native Kubernetes.

Before Tribia, I spent a decade working in consultancy at Coherent Solutions and Tieto. I've worked with various clients, from banks to startups, building products ranging from pretty basic web portals to high-load SaaS and high-sec on-premise solutions. I've jumped around quite a bit and worked with a ton of different technologies - it's probably easier to list the ones I haven't touched yet (just kidding — but not by much).

Always hungry to learn and love working with people who share that drive. Work is way more fun when you're surrounded by passionate people.

Bachelor's in AI, Master's in Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science. Was learning AI before it became a mainstream. I've also done a Ph.D. at BSUIR researching Semantic AI and Knowledge Graphs further, however, juggling that with a full-time job became a bit much. I finished the academic years, got a Researcher degree (not sure if it has a direct EU/US equivalent), but dropped out of the Ph.D. dissertation defend in order to focus on my software engineering career.

Still, the experience was worth it - it made me way more experiment-driven in everyday life. No Ph.D., but I've certainly perfected the skill of questioning and overthinking everything, especially my own life decisions.

Other

If I'm not in the office, I'm probably still staring into a screen at home.

Every now and then, you might actually find me away from screens. I love being outdoors - hiking through the mountains, running by the sea or playing tennis. I don't have many constants, but this one stuck: gym, pool, sauna, three times a week. It's become a routine I actually look forward to.

When I slow down, I turn to long walks, good books, chess and music. I believe that a person's taste in music and books reveals more about them than words ever could.

I try to live by a simple rule - stay curious, quiet and kind and not take life too seriously. Most things work out in the end, just not always how you expect - the universe surely knows how to keep life interesting. Maybe that is the point? If we always knew what was coming, we'd miss the magic and joy of being surprised.

If you want to connect, please reach out! I'm usually friendly 🙃

You can email me at pavel@titenkov.com or send chat on Telegram (or wherever you manage to find me).

Feeling shy? You can send me an anonymous message 📤

Cheers!