Ilya Sakharov

After 25+ years in technology, I’ve learned that systems rarely fall over because they’re too complex – they fall over because humans made them that way. I’ve spent my career leading engineering organizations through hyper-growth, transformation, and “this really shouldn’t be down” moments, turning chaos into scalable platforms, sane processes, and teams that actually enjoy shipping.

Today, I lead engineering at Redcare Pharmacy, where 170+ engineers keep Europe’s largest e-pharmacy running across eRX, webshop, apps, payments, and multi-country operations. Think hundreds of thousands of daily orders, complex regulation, and zero tolerance for downtime. My focus: build resilient platforms, raise engineering standards, and make sure quality and reliability are owned by teams – not thrown over the wall to someone else.

Before this, I was CTO at Codility, steering the company through a market downturn, a refinancing, and a tech transformation—simultaneously increasing release velocity and keeping customer satisfaction above 95%. I also cut AWS costs by 45% in four months, which confused enough people that I had to assure them nothing important had been unplugged. Acting as interim Head of Product, I helped teams ship more in one quarter than they had in the previous year. Turns out clarity, discovery, and outcome focus work wonders.

Before that, I built and scaled platform, infrastructure, SRE, and quality organizations at companies like Getir, HelloFresh, and RSA Security. From turning infrastructure into a self-service developer platform, to reducing MTTR below 40 minutes, to saving hundreds of thousands per month in cloud costs, the theme has been consistent: make systems robust, teams effective, and investments in technology actually pay off.

My philosophy is straightforward: engineering is a strategic asset, not a cost center. Great teams outperform great processes. And the job of technology leadership is to create clarity, remove noise, and build organizations capable of solving tomorrow’s problems – not just firefighting today’s.

If you’re dealing with scale, complexity, legacy platforms, or organizational growing pains – and you’re looking for someone who will bring experience, challenge your assumptions, and stay focused on outcomes – we should talk. I’m particularly interested in collaborations around platform strategy, org design, engineering excellence, and making technology a genuine competitive advantage rather than an expensive liability.