Context
Marpla provides tools for marketplace sellers: analytics, advertising management, SEO, and A/B testing. As CTO, I was responsible for the engineering team, architecture, infrastructure, budget, and development processes.
The challenge: make delivery predictable
The product needed an engineering organization with clear priorities, regular releases, and infrastructure that supported service continuity.
The team initially delivered 2–3 releases per month. Alongside ongoing product development, more than 50 TB of production data needed to be migrated without downtime.
My responsibility
I led a team of over 30 people and owned hiring, technical priorities, architecture, budget, and alignment with the business. My responsibility included building the process from defining a task to releasing a change.
I remained technically involved, working on architecture and engaging deeply with frontend, backend, and infrastructure challenges.
How the team worked
I introduced transparent planning, acceptance criteria, quality checks, and release discipline. I organized a shared workflow across business stakeholders, support, and engineering, and introduced frontend versioning and trunk-based development.
I developed the use of analytics, automated testing, and development automation. These changes supported a more regular release process and the team’s day-to-day work.
A migration that kept the product running
I organized the migration of production infrastructure and over 50 TB of data from Hetzner to servers in Russia over two months. The key constraint was preserving service availability and user data.
The team completed the migration without downtime or data loss. My role was technical leadership and accountability for the result within the broader infrastructure work.
Reliability, performance, and costs
Together with the team, we improved MongoDB and network reliability: almost daily incidents fell to one incident over two months. Work across the legacy infrastructure and frontend reduced page load times from 10–20 seconds to 2–4 seconds.
As part of budget management, monthly development spending decreased by 40%, while infrastructure and server costs decreased by 30%. My responsibility covered cost control, technical priorities, and planning with business stakeholders.
Behind the outcomes
Regular releases and reliable infrastructure are the result of a team’s work. My contribution as CTO was to build the engineering organization, connect its work with product needs, and take responsibility for the technical outcome.