You have an idea. Not a tech team.
You know what you want to build, but turning it into working software means making decisions you're not equipped to evaluate yet.
Hands-on engineering lead · early-stage startups
Build the product.
Skip the engineering circus.
I help founders turn ideas into working software, make practical technical decisions, and build small engineering teams when they're actually needed.
I lead the engineering. I write the code. I help you decide what not to build.
- Alex Vopilovskiy
- 15+ years in software
- Based in Belgrade, working remotely
01
Problems
Sound familiar?
Your MVP needs to grow up.
You have users and new requirements, but delivering every new feature is becoming harder than it should be.
You have developers. But who's leading engineering?
Tasks are moving, but nobody clearly owns technical direction, delivery, and the consequences of today's decisions.
02
Capabilities
From first build to a team that can deliver.
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01
Build the MVP
Turn product goals into a working product. Focus on the essential functionality and get it into users' hands.
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02
Lead engineering
Own technical decisions, architecture, development priorities and engineering delivery, while contributing production code.
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03
Keep complexity under control
Choose solutions that fit the product's current needs instead of introducing systems and infrastructure it does not need yet.
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04
Build the team
Help hire, onboard and mentor engineers. Establish clear ownership and practical engineering processes.
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05
Prepare for growth
Improve testing, reliability, deployment, observability and architecture when the product actually needs them.
03
Proof
I've done this before.
AllCart
Led a 5-person engineering team · Core platform in 1 year
Joined as the founding Engineering Manager and built the engineering team behind a Shopify-style e-commerce platform. Owned architecture, infrastructure, hiring, and technical delivery while spending most of my time writing code.
What that involved
Founding Engineering Manager · September 2020 to May 2022
- Built and led a team of five engineers. Hired six people in total: two DevOps, one backend, two frontend and one QA.
- Delivered the core of a Shopify-style multi-tenant e-commerce platform in about one year.
- Worked roughly 70% on code and 30% on leadership, as the primary backend engineer in Node.js and TypeScript.
- Built product catalog, carts, payments, theming, messaging, orders, abandoned carts and basic warehouse functionality.
- Ran cloud infrastructure on Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Storage, with CI/CD for builds, tests, migrations and deployments.
- 200 stories were closed, 125 of them written by me.
- Worked with the product manager to postpone complex warehouse stock balance and synchronization work, because its scope was large relative to its immediate value.
VoiceScript
MVP in 1 month
Led delivery of a real-time transcript viewer MVP. Also built production systems processing about 500,000 real-time messages per day and worked on frontend architecture and platform infrastructure.
What that involved
Full stack engineer · July 2022 to July 2026
- Led development of Attorney Player, a real-time transcript viewer for lawyers.
- Delivered the MVP in one month.
- Built a real-time update pipeline handling about 500,000 messages per day, replacing backend polling with WebSockets.
- Built an email processing pipeline of about 3,000 emails per day.
- Implemented Stripe payments and subscriptions, handling about 10,000 webhooks per day.
- Architected the React and TypeScript frontend in a team of three.
- Extracted the frontend from a legacy monorepo and deployed it on Cloudflare Pages.
- Worked with speech-to-text and LLM processing systems.
SkinSwipe
10k to 120k users during this work
Designed the backend and mobile APIs for a trading platform as its user base grew. Built a market price aggregation system and mentored other developers.
What that involved
Lead Backend Software Engineer · November 2018 to September 2020
- Designed the Node.js backend and the mobile APIs for a trading platform that grew from about 10,000 to 120,000 users during this work.
- Built auctions, trades, chats, caching and sessions.
- Built SteamFox, a market price aggregator for Counter-Strike and Dota items, processing sales statistics for about 50,000 items per collection cycle.
- Designed the pricing logic that replaced client-reported prices.
- Built a Vue.js frontend alongside the existing iOS and Android apps.
- Mentored three team members.
04
Method
Sometimes the best engineering decision is not to build something.
Deciding what not to build is part of the engineering, not a delay in it.
At AllCart
The team considered more advanced warehouse inventory tracking and synchronization. The scope was large and the immediate product value was smaller, so the work was postponed. Nothing about that decision was permanent: the need would come back when the product was ready for it.
The lesson is not that warehouse management is unimportant. It is that the right technical decision depends on the product's stage and priorities.
How I frame it: every feature has a cost. Every abstraction has a cost. The challenge is knowing which costs are justified today.
- New feature requested
- Does it solve an important problem now?
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- No Defer it
- Yes Build the simplest viable solution
Principles
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Solve the real problem
Understand the business need before choosing a technical solution. A well-built feature that solves the wrong problem is still waste.
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Build only what's needed
Avoid introducing complexity for hypothetical future requirements. Systems are easier to add to than to simplify.
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Make decisions that can evolve
Keep the system understandable, testable and maintainable as requirements change.
05
Formats
The right level of engineering support for your stage.
Hands-on Tech Lead
For founders who need someone to take ownership of engineering, make technical decisions, and actively build the product.
- Technical leadership
- Architecture and development
- Delivery planning
- Engineering process
- Hiring guidance
Engineering Lead + Developers
When the product needs more engineering capacity, I can help bring in developers I've worked with and personally trust, while continuing to lead the technical work.
- Everything in Hands-on Tech Lead
- Additional engineering capacity
- Team coordination
- Code review and mentoring
- Consistent technical direction
Additional developers are optional. When the product needs more capacity, I bring in people I have worked with before and stay accountable for the technical direction. There is no agency behind this page, no fixed-price delivery promise, and no CTO role with fundraising: the format and the scope are agreed after the first conversation.
06
Start
Start with a conversation, not a big commitment.
A short call is enough to see whether this is useful for your product.
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01
Understand the product
We discuss the idea, current stage, engineering challenges, and immediate priorities.
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02
Agree on the next step
We identify useful work, expected outcomes, responsibilities, and a suitable engagement format.
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03
Build and iterate
Work begins with clear priorities, practical engineering decisions, and regular communication.
07
About
An engineer first. A leader when needed.
I'm Alex, a full-stack engineer with over 15 years of experience building software, leading teams, and solving problems that don't always need complicated solutions. I've worked on products from their earliest stages through growth and production operations. I enjoy staying close to the code while helping teams make better technical decisions. I work remotely from Belgrade, Serbia, with European time zone overlap.
- ADPList Top 10 Mentor · March 2025
- ADPList 3,000 Mentorship Minutes · September 2026
08
Contact
Tell me what you're building.
An idea, an MVP, or a growing product. Tell me where you are today and what technical challenge you're facing.