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, taking in 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, even so I still view “management” with a bit of skepticism. For me, building teams and growing engineers is just as 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 comfortable steering the ship or rowing with the crew - I'm all in and love keep my hands dirty with code. I'm balancing my work schedule usually full of meetings with late-night 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.
Today, 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 grow, experiment and enjoy the journey. 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. 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 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. It's probably easier to list the ones I haven't touched yet.
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. 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've certainly perfected the skill of questioning and overthinking everything — especially when it comes to 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. Gym, swimming 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 long walks, 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 love spending time alone and recharge best in solitude, where I can reflect and unwind, so that I'm ready to quickly put my mask back on when I'm around others.
I'm not great at sitting still for too long — I get random bursts of inspiration, whether it's an unplanned little journey or trading sleep for late-night coding projects. Who knows, maybe one of these projects will turn into the next big thing (even if most 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 not always how you expect - the universe surely 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, feel free 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).
Feeling shy? You can also send me an anonymous message 📤
Cheers!