About
Bio
Hi, I'm Pavel 👋 I build web products and strong engineering teams. Code or people? I can't decide which one I enjoy more, so just keep doing both.
I 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 swapped my hometown of Minsk for Norway's fjords in early 2021. One day, I'd love to return (guess why I haven't booked a ticket yet), but for now I'm enjoying life in Norway's picturesque and calm surroundings and pretending I enjoy the cold.
Work
You can check out my professional journey on LinkedIn. I started as a software engineer and later stepped into engineering management. I find building teams and growing engineers as just rewarding as building great products. And, well… sometimes if you want things done right, you've just got to jump in and do it yourself.
I'm equally happy steering the ship and rowing with the crew - I love staying hands-on, balancing my usually full of meetings schedule with coding to keep those muscles from atrophying.
As an engineer, I worked my way up to senior roles (tech lead / solution architect), tackling everything from frontend and mobile to backend and infra. 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.
These days I'm an Engineering Manager at Tribia, doing my best to make engineering feel like a craft rather than just a job and building an environment where engineers can experiment, learn and enjoy the journey. 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 challenging waters of a fast-growing scaleup.
I automate anything that stands still for too long. Over the years, I've built CI/CD pipelines used across 100+ repositories at Tribia, set up IaaC for Auth0 and Keycloak, brought in feature toggling, trunk-based development and NewRelic monitoring - although I've also introduced a few heavy bills along the way! One of my proudest moments at Tribia? Helping it 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).
I'm always hungry to learn and love being around people who share that drive. I put my heart and soul into everything I do — and I vibe best with driven folks who do the same. Work is way more fun when you're surrounded by passionate people.
Education
I have a Bachelor's degree in Artificial Intelligence and a Master's in Theoretical foundations of computer science. I've also done a Ph.D. at BSUIR researching Semantic AI and Knowledge Graphs, 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 coding, you'll probably find me outdoors — hiking in the mountains, running by the sea or on the tennis court. Gym, swimming pool and sauna are my health constants - some days I'm lifting heavy, other days I'm just trying not to sink.
When I slow down, I turn to long walks, deep talks, good books, chess and music. I've always believed that a person's taste in music and books reveals more about them than words ever could.
I've got golden retriever energy, so I'm not good at sitting still. I follow inspiration wherever it decides to show up, whether it's a spontaneous adventure or side hustle at 2am.
I try to live by a simple rule — stay curious, quiet and kind, and do 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.
Headshots
Epilogue
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!