Pavel Gorlov

Unit lead / Head of Tech / CTO

Pavel Gorlov

Summary

Saint Petersburg, remote or hybrid

Engineering Manager / Acting CTO. 10+ years of management (4 teams, up to 22 engineers), 17+ years in web development. Building teams and processes, scaling platforms, connecting business and technology.

Selected impact:

Ready to take on technical leadership of a unit up to 50 engineers: org design, people management, delivery, reliability. Format: Remote/Hybrid, SPb; full-time or fractional.

Key Competencies

Leadership Skills and People Management

I adapt my management style to the team's maturity and context, striving for Servant Leadership while maintaining flexibility. Tools I've used: regular 1-1s, performance reviews, 360 feedback, skip-level meetings, individual development plans, competency matrices.

Communication and Influence

I advocate for asynchronous communication and documentation, understanding that sometimes meetings are necessary, in which case they should have a clear agenda. I believe in "quiet influence." I have experience in conflict resolution, translating between business and technical language, facilitation, and mediation.

Architecture and Infrastructure

Microservices architecture, Event-driven architecture, API Design (REST, GraphQL), DevOps practices (CI/CD, observability).

Technical Stack

Python, Ruby, Go, Typescript, Postgres, Docker, Kafka, worked with a large number of technologies and tools within web development.

Management Framework

Agile (Scrum, Kanban) methodologies and the theory of constraints are closest to me. Main tool experience — Atlassian ecosystem (JIRA, Confluence, etc.) combined with Slack.

Work Experience

Aviasales / Travelpayouts

Dec 2009 - Aug 2025 (15y 8m)

Growth: Junior → Middle → Senior → Tech/Frontend TL → Product Manager → Engineering Manager → Head of Technology.

Head of Technology

Jan 2023 - Aug 2025 (2y 7m)

  • 4 teams, up to 22 engineers, over 5 major projects, over 30 microservices and microfrontends
  • Formed an engineering team for a new flagship AI tools product.
  • Restructured engineering teams within product teams: introduced team leads in all teams, balanced team workload across projects, and optimized team composition for business requirements. This reduced idle time and increased development throughput.
  • Formed and launched an integrations team (technical accounting).
  • Responsible for unit infrastructure budgeting.
  • Led technical integration of enterprise partners with Aviasales.
  • Led the unit's migration to AWS cloud infrastructure, migrated without increasing infrastructure costs, achieving ~20% improvement in static content delivery speed and availability increase to 99.97%.
  • Initiated implementation and deployment of common approaches to observability and traffic routing. This reduced average incident resolution time by 20%.
  • Implemented on-call duties and created duty regulations.
  • Together with security engineers and external contractors, conducted two security audits that found no critical vulnerabilities.
  • Developed an action plan and preparatory measures for crisis situations such as RKN blockings or the need for unit isolation.
  • Prepared and implemented partner network integration with the "advertising law" in accordance with business and legal department requirements.
  • Led development and brought to production several major projects: "advertising law," new Whitelabel (outsourced), MVP sales boost tool (5% revenue growth in first quarter), new tool delivery system (+20% installation conversion).

Engineering Manager

Mar 2022 - Jan 2023 (10m)

  • Led implementation of custom partner program for Aviasales' new brand in the US market, launched under tight deadlines. Delivered everything on time and in full scope.
  • Technical debt quarter: 10+ engineers under direct management, gathered context, broke down into initiatives, organized working groups. As a result, several projects significantly reduced maintenance costs, several projects were deprecated, saving ~1% Revenue.
  • Coordinated cross-team interactions, was responsible for cross-team initiative architecture and conflict resolution.
  • Together with HR, implemented a competency matrix for engineers.

Product manager

Nov 2020 - Mar 2022 (1y 4m)

  • Planned MVP functionality and basic architecture of a new product from scratch. Aligned the plan with stakeholders.
  • Assembled a team: 3 frontend engineers and 2 backend.
  • In 9 months, the team implemented MVP and launched it to production for beta testing.

Tech lead / Frontend Team lead

Mar 2016 - Nov 2020 (4y 7m)

  • Managed 5–7 frontend engineers, first within one team, then after dividing into directions, across multiple teams.
  • Developed many embeddable widgets, then actively promoted development of a universal SDK and implemented its core. As a result, new widgets were created with minimal development involvement.
  • Adapted the core of Aviasales search engine for Whitelabel solution.
  • Coordinated technical integrations with enterprise partners such as MegaFon, Tema.ru, Sheremetyevo, Pulkovo, Tinkoff, etc.
  • Played a key role in splitting the unit monolith into microservices.
  • Actively participated in implementing DevOps practices in the company, particularly introduced CI/CD pipeline and containerization of frontend projects within the unit.

Senior Software Engineer

May 2013 - Mar 2016 (2y 10m)

  • Separation of Travelpayouts unit from Aviasales, lead role.
  • Implemented many widgets and the first Aviasales Whitelabel.
  • Played a key role in implementing metrics and A/B mechanism.

Junior/Middle Software Engineer

Dec 2009 - May 2013 (3y 5m)

  • Responsible for Aviasales content engine (over 100,000 pages), implemented caching, speeding up content loading/generation 3x. Automated position analysis and content adjustment, achieved top positions in search engines with 80% of service traffic being organic.
  • Worked on migrating the search engine from PHP to Ruby.
  • Played a key role in planning and implementing high-performance in-memory price cache and wrote UI for it.
  • Created the first embeddable Aviasales search widgets and the first version of back-office for partners.

Education and Certifications