Engineering Leader · PhD in Formal Methods · Executive MBA

Ilia Zakharov

I turn chaos into systems, and systems into flywheels.

The method

  1. Understand the chaos. I don't impose structure too early — let the mess show its real shape first.
  2. Build the system. Structure that fits the actual problem, not a template.
  3. Optimize. Lean: cut waste, tighten the loops, make it faster than it was.

I don't improvise. For each layer I use the best proven frameworks — and I know when not to apply them.

15+ years: operating systems, blockchain protocols, engineering organizations.

2024 – now · Pi2 Labs / Fast

Engineering Manager → Head of Engineering

Built the company's operating system — the build-then-optimize loop across People, Processes & Agents. Grew the org from ~5 to 30–40 people, pre-seed → Series A.

  • Planning hit rate 30% → 90% across teams via clearer planning, continuous feedback and delivery tracking.
  • Lead time 3–4 weeks → 1 week, replacing two-week cycles and ad-hoc coordination with tight one-week loops.
  • Release 30 min → 3 min, commit-to-prod, through CI image builds and fully automated deployment on a self-hosted Hetzner Swarm cluster — built from zero to 3 environments (staging / testnet / prod).
  • Team-lead attrition 3 / year → 0 after introducing continuous feedback and practicing situational leadership.
  • CI & infra cost cut ÷3 by moving suitable workloads from AWS to a self-hosted Hetzner setup.
  • DevNet: idea → 150K TPS in 3 months — managing development of a security-critical distributed payments network.

2021–2023 · Runtime Verification

Verification Engineer

  • Led security audits of Algorand & Ethereum smart contracts — surfacing high-impact vulnerabilities and rounding/math bugs in lending, borrowing and monitoring protocols.
  • Formal modeling in Isabelle/HOL, model-based testing and fuzzing; built internal blockchain analytics and monitoring tooling.
  • Zero-knowledge — leading an audit of a ZK design.

2012–2021 · Institute for System Programming, RAS

Researcher · Formal Methods

  • Automated verification of large C programs — environment-modeling decomposition (the core of my PhD), applied to real OS and filesystem code.
  • ~300 defects found in the Linux kernel and proprietary filesystems via the Klever framework.
  • PhD in formal methods · Presidential Scholarship · Microsoft Research Summer School, Cambridge · 3× Google Summer of Code.

Next challenge

I'm looking for the next challenge: a company where I can help growth and turn engineering into a flywheel — the operational complement to a strong CTO.

Serbia · from zero

In 2022 I moved to Serbia — first to the country, then to Subotica — and built a life from zero. Same skill, on my own life: understand the chaos, build the system, optimize.

Contact me!

EMBA, ESEM Belgrade · PhD CS, ISP RAS · MS/BS Applied Math & Physics, MIPT