Ilia Zakharov

Ilia Zakharov

Hands-on Engineering Leader

Engineering leader who owns systems end to end: technical direction, delivery, culture, and team growth.

Serbia | Open to relocation (London/EU) | Available for remote (EU/US overlap).

Download CV LinkedIn GitHub Email

Summary

Engineering leader who owns systems end to end - planning and shaping technical direction, engineering delivery and culture, and growing the team.

I strengthen the team where it counts: hands-on contribution and technical guidance, mentoring engineers, managing stakeholder expectations, and building a flywheel for predictable delivery.

I bring 15+ years in engineering across formal methods, distributed systems, blockchain, operating systems, AI agents, and infrastructure, plus 7+ years of technical leadership and 6 years of people management leading engineering teams - a systematic approach grounded in a CS PhD and an executive MBA.

  • End-to-end ownership
  • Predictable delivery systems
  • Hands-on technical guidance
  • Team growth and culture

Experience

Pi Squared Inc. (Pi2 Labs) - Engineering Manager -> Head of Engineering. US-based startup, pre-seed to pre-Series A, remote distributed team across Asia, Europe, and the US, 2023-2026.

  • Owned engineering culture: helped mostly-PhD research engineers adapt to product development, built repeatable sourcing, hiring, onboarding, and team formation, and grew the team from 5 to 27.
  • Built an internal AI-agent operations layer: Hermes/OpenClaw agent APIs over Postgres/pgvector vector search and a LangGraph processing layer, giving leadership live project status, alerts, and automation across departments.
  • Wrote hands-on Python and TypeScript: a K-framework to MetaMath proof translation layer, plus automation connecting GitHub workflows, monitoring, reporting, and quality gates.
  • Helped bring Fast's payment system for agents to mainnet: shaped delivery, DevOps, on-call, mainnet security strategy, and long-term data-layer scaling under budget and cloud-cost constraints.
  • Ran cloud and bare-metal as build-vs-buy: production on Hetzner with Docker Swarm at about one-third equivalent AWS/GCP compute cost, while using Vercel, Railway, Datadog, OSS monitoring, and self-hosted GitHub runners where each fit.
  • Owned incident response and on-call: wrote playbooks, carried the rotation personally, and defended a mainnet system handling real-value tokens against perimeter attacks and validator compromise attempts.
  • Cut deployment time: from hours to 5 minutes by tightening CI/CD, making release ownership explicit, and automating deployment and dev-to-release handoff.
  • Cut delivery lead time: to under a week from commit to production, moving the org from two-week to one-week sprints while holding a 70-90% sprint hit rate.
  • Shaped roadmap and delivery risk: built and maintained a live risk backlog, sequenced products against technical risk and release readiness, and pushed back when execution paths or evidence were weak.
  • Built performance and growth loops: ran 360 feedback, moved to lighter bi-weekly check-ins, clarified ownership and decision boundaries, mentored PMs and team leads, and cut team-lead attrition from 3/year to 0.
  • Built two-way reporting: bottom-up from engineers to leadership and top-down briefings back to teams, so status, priorities, and context moved without founder bottlenecks.

Earlier Experience

Runtime Verification

Verification Engineer | US-based, remote | 2021-2023

  • Led audits of Algorand and Ethereum smart contracts and protocol systems end to end, from first customer contact to final report.
  • Combined security reasoning, formal methods, distributed-systems context, and guidance for shadow auditors.
  • Built formal models and simulations in Isabelle/HOL that surfaced high-impact vulnerabilities, rounding and mathematical errors, and correctness risks before release.
  • Reviewed cryptographic and zero-knowledge designs for correctness, including proof-compression, and led in-house analytics and monitoring tooling for protocol behavior and operational risk.

EMURGO Learning

Guest Lecturer, Formal Verification | Los Angeles, CA, remote part-time | 2022-2023

Designed and delivered an online formal-verification course across several cohorts, making formal-verification tools usable by working engineers without a PhD.

Institute for System Programming, RAS

Verification Engineer / Researcher | 2012-2021

  • Built Klever, a distributed component-wise verification framework for large C codebases, written in Python and scheduled across Docker Swarm.
  • Applied verification to Linux kernel and proprietary filesystem code at Samsung and Huawei, surfacing 300 defects.
  • Wrote automated extraction and generation of environment models for event-driven C systems, enabling automatic verification runs.
  • Managed and grew junior engineers joining the team, owning their performance, guiding them technically, and driving multi-year research projects to completion.
  • Completed PhD work in automated verification of large C programs; research cited 180+ times, h-index 7; 3x Google Summer of Code; Microsoft PhD Summer School, Cambridge.

Education and Recognition

  • Executive MBA: ESEM Business School, Belgrade, President Scholarship (2024-2025).
  • PhD, Computer Science: Institute for System Programming, Russian Academy of Sciences (2014-2019).
  • MS and BS, Applied Mathematics and Physics: Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) (2008-2014).

Skills

Engineering leadership: Engineering Management, Team Lead, Head of Engineering, hiring, coaching, mentoring, one-on-ones, stakeholder management, cross-functional execution, distributed teams, capacity planning.

Infrastructure and platform: IaC, AWS, GCP, Hetzner, Docker Swarm, CI/CD, self-hosted GitHub runners, Datadog, Railway, Vercel, bare-metal and public cloud, build-vs-buy, infrastructure cost management, container service boundaries.

Delivery and reliability: delivery planning, roadmaps, release automation, DevOps, DORA metrics, quality gates, monitoring, incident response, on-call, developer productivity.

Hands-on and AI-agent systems: Python, TypeScript, C, Solidity, code review, architecture, AI-agent orchestration, OpenClaw/Hermes agent harnesses, GitHub workflows, internal tooling.

High-trust engineering: distributed systems, smart-contract audits, blockchain security, formal methods and verification, automated software verification, Isabelle/HOL, static analysis, model checking, model-based testing, TDD, fuzzing, program analysis, correctness and security analysis.

Contact