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 surroundings, soaking up the nordic vibes 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 enjoy building great engineers and teams as much as great products and, well… if you want something done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself.
I'm equally comfortable leading teams or getting my hands dirty (wherever I can make the biggest impact or where the biggest mess needs cleaning up). I'm balancing my work schedule of endless meetings with late-night side projects — gotta keep the coding muscles from atrophying.
As an engineer, I worked my way up to senior roles (lead/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.
Right now, I'm an Engineering Manager at Tribia. Here I do my best building a space where the engineers can grow, experiment, innovate and have fun doing what they love. I've had the chance to lead a couple of key initiatives (like SaaS, Platform, IAM/SSO, Notification Engine) and help steering the engineering ship through the exciting (and sometimes challenging) waters of a fast-growing scaleup.
I'm automating anything that stands still for too long. I've built CI/CD pipelines used across 100+ repositories at Tribia, set up IaaC for Auth0 and Keycloak, brought in feature toggling and trunk-based development and introduced NewRelic monitoring - although I also introduced a few heavy bills along the way! One of my proudest moments at Tribia? Helping Tribia 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.
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 humble and 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. program at BSUIR doing the research in 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 (which doesn't really have a direct EU/US equivalent), but dropped out of the Ph.D. defense 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 did master the ability to question and overthinking everything — especially my own 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. The gym, pool and sauna are my constants - some days I'm lifting heavy, other days I'm just trying not to sink.
When I slow down, I turn to walks, books, chess, music or guitar. I love spending time alone and recharge best in solitude, where I can reflect and unwind. That way, I can quickly put my mask back on when I'm with others.
I can't sit still for long — I get random bursts of inspiration and end up trading sleep for late-night coding projects. Who knows, maybe one of these ideas will be the next big thing (even if more than half of them never see the light of day).
I try to live by a simple rule — stay curious, quiet and kind, and do not take life too seriously. I've learned that most things work out in the end, just maybe not in the way you expected. Turns out, 'having a plan' is just a polite way of telling the universe what to mess with next. Life has a much better imagination than I do and sure knows how to keep things interesting. But maybe that's 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 don't hesitate to reach out. I'm usually friendly 🙃
You can email me at pavel@titenkov.com or send chat directly on Telegram (or wherever you manage to find me)
Cheers!