Alex Brilliantov

Fractional CTO · Engineering Advisor · Interim Head of Engineering

Senior engineering leadership, without the full-time hire

I step into startups and scale-ups that have outgrown their engineering setup — as a fractional CTO, an advisor to your existing team, or an interim Head of Engineering while you hire.

Track record

  • 5 → 40+

    Remote engineers

    Built and led a distributed engineering org at Chainstack while the company grew from 10 to 110 people.

  • 1 → 30-40

    Releases per month

    Moved teams off big-bang releases onto agile micro-releases with QA and security gates in CI/CD.

  • 99.99%

    Uptime initiative

    Led the cross-department programme that took service availability to four nines.

  • ~65

    Engineers today

    Technical Director for Imunify360 at CloudLinux — development, malware research and QA.

  • 4 clouds

    Multi-cloud infrastructure

    AWS, GCP, Azure and Virtuozzo, with infrastructure as code on Terraform and Kubernetes.

  • 2

    Blockchain patents

    Ledger data transfer and replication; pull-based orchestration of nodes.

How we can work together

  • Fractional CTO

    A few days a month of senior technical ownership: architecture decisions, hiring bar, roadmap feasibility, vendor and cloud choices, and a direct line for your founders.

    • Technical strategy the board can read
    • Architecture and build-vs-buy calls
    • Engineering hiring and levelling
  • Interim Head of Engineering

    Full-time cover while you search for a permanent leader — keeping delivery, morale and the hiring pipeline moving instead of stalling for six months.

    • Own delivery and team health from day one
    • Run the search and hand over cleanly
    • Stabilise release cadence and on-call
  • Engineering advisor

    Ongoing sparring for a CTO or founding engineer who wants a second opinion from someone who has already scaled the thing they are about to build.

    • Monthly architecture and process review
    • Escalation path for hard calls
    • Post-mortem and reliability practice

Where I add the most

  • Scaling remote teams

    Hiring, levelling and structuring distributed engineering orgs — from the first five hires to 40+ across time zones, including the HR-less phase where the engineering lead runs the whole pipeline.

  • Release velocity

    Cutting the distance between commit and production: agile process, CI/CD gates for QA and security, trunk-based habits, and the metrics that show whether it worked.

  • Reliability at scale

    99.99% uptime programmes, observability with OpenTracing/Grafana/Prometheus, on-call that people can live with, and post-mortems that change behaviour.

  • Multi-cloud infrastructure

    AWS, GCP, Azure and Virtuozzo under one infrastructure-as-code story with Terraform and Kubernetes — including the cost conversation nobody wants to have.

  • AI adoption in engineering

    Embedding AI agents into QA and architecture-review gates, standardising internal AI workflows, and building an LLM-maintained knowledge platform so teams and agents share one view of ownership and decisions.

  • Security-critical products

    Ownership of a server-security suite protecting web hosts at scale: malware detection, WAF, proactive defense and automated patching.

Why me

Technical Director for Imunify360 at CloudLinux today, with an engineering organisation of about 65. Before that: R&D Director at Virtuozzo, Engineering Director at Chainstack through its 10 → 110 growth, CTO at Yango.pro, and CTO and founder of Litexit.ru — sold to the largest Russian player in its market. Two blockchain patents. Based in Belgrade, working across European time zones.

Read the full CV

Frequently asked questions

Let's talk about your engineering org

A 30-minute intro call, no pitch deck. Tell me what is slowing delivery down and I will tell you whether I am the right person for it.

Book an intro call