Alexander Gladchenko

Senior Solutions Architect |
AI & Cloud Platforms

  • Senior Solutions Architect with 15+ years delivering enterprise AI and cloud platforms across Banking, Telecom, Insurance, and Manufacturing — hands-on from discovery through production.
  • Customer-facing pre-sales and architecture: executive workshops, RFP/RFI, POC/MVP design, C4 target-state models, and DR/risk planning for external clients (North America via EPAM; B2B/B2G at tier-1 bank and telecom).
  • AI platform delivery at scale: RAG/GraphRAG, agent builders, Skills/Tools Registry, secure agent runtime, voice assistants, and BFF/MCP integrations with a ~120-person cross-functional organization.
  • End-to-end architecture governance (ADR/RFC, design review, guardrails), DDD, event-driven architecture (Kafka/RabbitMQ, Saga, Outbox/CDC), Strangler migrations, and AWS Well-Architected production patterns.
  • Proven business impact: TTM from ~3 months to ~3 weeks, incidents down to ~5%, 99.95% uptime SLA, and high-load systems sustaining up to 15k TPS.
  • Hands-on IC contributor: strongest in JavaScript, Java, and Python; language-agnostic — reads any codebase, ships production code, and unblocks teams on deep technical issues.
  • Remote-first; aligned to US & Canada business hours; fluent with technical, executive, and client audiences in English; comfortable in regulated banking and telecom environments.
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Main skills

Solutions & Enterprise Architecture
98 / 100
Full-Stack Software Engineering
97 / 100
High-Load & Distributed Systems
96 / 100
Cloud Infrastructure & Microservices
95 / 100
Technical Leadership & Product Delivery
95 / 100
AI Platform & Intelligent Systems Design
94 / 100
DevOps & Continuous Delivery
92 / 100
Mentoring, Hiring & Engineering Culture
91 / 100
Pre-Sales & Stakeholder Engagement
90 / 100
Technical Documentation & Regulatory Compliance
89 / 100
September 2025 - Present

Top 1 Bank in Eastern Europe (100M+ clients) — Remote · EMEA

Lead Solutions Architect

  • Joined following exclusive transfer of architecture consulting IP, C4/ADR/RFC frameworks, and founder expertise from a solo consulting practice under mutual agreement (September 2025).
  • Organizational Leadership & Department Building:
  • Built the architecture and system analysis department from the ground up for a 120-person AI organization, establishing hiring, grading, role matrix, onboarding, and career development frameworks.
  • Lead a cross-functional organization of architects, system analysts, engineers, and ML/AI specialists across AI Platform, agent infrastructure, and voice-assistant programs.
  • Mentor team leads and senior engineers; manage technical risk and architectural debt with prioritization, mitigation roadmaps, and transparent reporting to leadership.
  • Plan releases across multiple streams, correlate team capacity with business commitments, and align stakeholder communication with architectural milestones.
  • AI Platform & Product Delivery:
  • Architected and led delivery of a company-wide AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), reducing time-to-market for new AI services from 3 months to 3 weeks through standardized platform primitives and self-service onboarding.
  • Enabled B2C, B2B, and B2G product teams to launch AI services on a shared platform with secure, isolated agent runtimes and SLA-backed capacity planning.
  • Delivered end-to-end RAG, GraphRAG, and Naive-RAG capabilities that improved retrieval quality, reduced LLM hallucination risk, and scaled asynchronous document processing for production workloads.
  • Launched operator-grade voice agents and telephony integrations for subscriber-facing scenarios across web and phone channels.
  • Connected product experiences to platform capabilities through BFF and MCP integration layers, partnering with UI/UX design on end-user journeys.
  • Embedded low-code and no-code tooling across the user interaction chain to accelerate delivery without sacrificing architectural control.
  • Architecture Modernization:
  • Drove adoption of Domain-Driven Design and event-driven architecture (Kafka, Saga, CDC) to modernize legacy systems and enable scalable AI product development.
  • Led monolith decomposition using the Strangler Fig pattern with staged service extraction, data migration, and backward-compatible contracts.
  • Introduced BPMN orchestration and platform-wide resilience patterns to improve reliability and clarify process vs. domain ownership.
  • Governance & Operational Excellence:
  • Established a comprehensive architecture governance framework (ADR/RFCs, design reviews, guardrails) that became the standard for the AI division.
  • Engineered the platform for a 99.95% uptime SLA by implementing a full observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and SLO/SLI definitions.
  • Reduced production incidents to ~5% through design reviews, automated quality gates, idempotency standards, and operational readiness reviews before launch.
  • Own end-to-end release and testing processes with architectural compliance checks, post-release reviews, and standardized internal release communication.
  • Business, Stakeholder & Regulatory Leadership:
  • Translate business requirements into architectural roadmap decisions; communicate with C-level stakeholders, product leadership, and client-side decision makers.
  • Advise internal and external customers on cloud, hybrid, and on-prem adoption strategies that accelerate AI service delivery while meeting business goals.
  • Operate within banking regulatory, information-security, and compliance constraints; align architecture with audit, data-protection, and internal bank standards.
  • Internal Stakeholder & Platform Engagement:
  • Led architecture discovery, executive workshops, and POC/MVP cycles with internal B2B/B2G product teams adopting the AI platform; translated business goals into C4 target-state designs, RACI, quality attributes, and delivery roadmaps.
  • Translated business goals into architecture deliverables: RACI, scope and environmental constraints, product significance, quality attributes, API/integration design, CI/CD release policy, and delivery roadmap.
  • Produced current/target-state architecture packs with C4 (Context/Container), logical and physical data flows, network topology, BPM, DR/resilience, backups, access policies, risks, and dependencies.
  • Architecture Practice & Innovation:
  • Built internal tooling for automated generation of architecture artifacts and versioned documentation aligned with release cycles.
  • Introduced LLM-agent-assisted workflows to keep architectural changes consistent across the landscape and accelerate good-practice adoption.
  • Track industry trends in LLM agents, RAG, and agent platforms; convert them into pragmatic adoption roadmaps for the department.
March 2025 - January 2026

Architecture Consulting — Solo Practice — Remote · EMEA

Founder · Architecture Consulting

  • Founded and operated a solo architecture consulting practice: enterprise solution design, technical due diligence, and digital transformation advisory for finance, telecom, and manufacturing.
  • Delivered target-state architecture, C4-based documentation, ADR/RFC packs, and POC/MVP blueprints for client engagements.
  • Built proprietary tooling for automated generation of architecture artifacts (C4, governance templates) used in consulting delivery.
  • Active advisory Mar–Sep 2025 in parallel with full-time telecom employment; no competing engagements after transition.
  • September 2025: Exclusive expertise and framework transfer to a tier-1 bank in Eastern Europe under mutual agreement; transitioned to Executive Director in the AI/architecture division.
  • September 2025 – January 2026: Legal entity wind-down and closure only (no parallel client work).
April 2023 - September 2025

Top 50 Telecom Company (70M+ clients) — Remote · EMEA

Lead Solutions Architect

  • Lead Solutions Architect owning anti-fraud platform and SMS-stack modernization for a major national telecom operator.
  • Platform Delivery & Fraud Prevention:
  • Architected and led the delivery of a high-throughput (4-15k TPS) anti-fraud platform for SMS and voice, modernizing a core telecom service and protecting millions of users.
  • Delivered a multi-layered message delivery and validation architecture (fast-delivery, transit, target), improving timeliness and reliability of business-critical SMS traffic.
  • Built an end-to-end verification capability for SMS traffic analysis, enabling the business to identify grey routes and spam at scale.
  • Architecture & Technical Modernization:
  • Designed a multi-layered, event-driven architecture using Kafka and DDD principles, enabling robust cross-service workflows (Saga) and fault tolerance for critical message delivery.
  • Led the technical modernization strategy, including a monolith-to-microservices decomposition (Strangler Fig) and migration to gRPC, significantly improving system scalability and resilience.
  • Presented multiple migration options to executive stakeholders (PMs, team leads, CTO, Principal Enterprise Architect); won approval for a Strangler-based on-prem decomposition with canary releases, A/B testing, Kubernetes load balancing, and VM capacity roadmaps (Apr 2023 – Sep 2025).
  • Designed multi-region disaster recovery and platform-wide resilience patterns to maintain service continuity during peak load and regional failover events.
  • Innovation & Hands-on Engineering:
  • Demonstrated deep technical expertise by personally developing and deploying a real-time ML model for SMS traffic classification, directly contributing to the platform's core fraud detection capabilities.
  • Built PoCs to validate architectural concepts before production rollout, reducing delivery risk for high-impact telecom security features.
  • Leadership, Operations & Compliance:
  • Established a full-stack observability framework (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and directed the engineering team in maintaining 24/7 operations and SLO/SLI adherence.
  • Directed architects, developers, and engineers; ran ADR/RFC-based design reviews and mentored senior engineers through a multi-stream delivery program.
  • Translated business and regulatory requirements into architectural decisions; delivered compliance documentation and reporting, including RosReestr integration.
  • Managed technical and delivery risks with transparent leadership reporting; aligned release planning, team capacity, and stakeholder commitments across the program.
January 2011 - April 2023

EPAM Systems — Global IT Consulting — Remote · EMEA & North America

Senior Software Engineer → Solutions Architect / Technical Team Leader

  • Global provider of software engineering and IT consulting services. Progressive 12-year tenure from senior engineer to lead architect across financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and media clients.
  • Led the delivery team through a 3-week RFI phase for a new enterprise prospect: daily progress reporting and client meetings demonstrating EPAM's operating model — contributing to award of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar contract.
  • Ran client whiteboard and Quality Attribute workshops (~2/year from 2019; 10 working days to 5 weeks) with PMs, team leads, CTOs, and Principal Enterprise Architects — ~80% of engagements converted to approved POC or delivery contracts.
  • Solutions Architect / Technical Team Leader (Client: Financial / Tax) | July 2022 - April 2023
  • Owned target-state architecture for a major financial client, introducing ADR/RFC practices and standardizing architectural governance across delivery teams.
  • Designed event-driven integrations using Saga patterns for long-running workflows; advised on a scalable and fault-tolerant cloud migration strategy.
  • Applied DDD to event and API contracts with idempotency and versioning; produced PoCs and blueprints to validate approaches before implementation.
  • Translated business requirements into architectural decisions; negotiated scope and roadmaps with stakeholders and managed technical delivery risks.
  • Technical Team Leader / Solutions Architect (Client: EV Manufacturing) | April 2021 - July 2022
  • Led design and implementation of a BFF layer using GraphQL Federation, enabling domain ownership across multiple client-facing applications (Web, Mobile).
  • Established a full-scale CI/CD pipeline from scratch, incorporating Consumer-Driven Contract Testing to ensure API stability across teams.
  • Led code and design reviews; owned solution quality, performance, and reliability for systems built by the team.
  • Interviewed and hired team members; coached and mentored developers; worked with customer management and Enterprise Architects on solution strategy and costs.
  • Solutions Architect (Client: SwissRE) | August 2019 - August 2020
  • Architected a cloud-native insurance platform composed of 7 core microservices (Clearing Manager, Policy Manager, Process Manager, Deal Manager, Costings, Task Manager, Claims), coordinating with Enterprise Architects and delivery leads.
  • Pre-sold Clearing Manager as lead Solutions Architect and architecture author (Zurich workshops): automated deal/policy quality screening reduced ~3 months of manual analyst work to ~30 minutes or near-instant validated output — hybrid Azure and on-prem; all SwissRE deals and policies flowed through the platform in production (~6 months from development start).
  • Expanded the Clearing Manager architecture pattern to the remaining six microservices; served as Direct Manager for Clearing Manager and aligned cross-team delivery with client management expectations.
  • Interviewed and hired new team members; facilitated technology discussions with client stakeholders on solution approaches and costs.
  • Led code and design reviews across multiple teams and mentored junior developers, directly contributing to the growth of the Canadian organization.
  • Documented solution scope with RACI, architect assumptions, quality attributes, API/integration design, release roadmap, and current vs target-state views (C4, data flows, DR, risks, dependencies).
  • Solutions Architect (Client: Business Information & Media) | September 2017 - July 2019
  • Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines with Consumer-Driven Contract Testing — a practice adopted by 3 other teams, reducing integration defects across the program.
  • As lead Solutions Architect, presenting architect, and demo lead, pitched Cloud Gate on AWS via on-site workshops (Chicago, Budapest, Leiden, Toronto); internal adoption reached 70+ teams across 10 departments and divisions.
  • Automated cross-team and cross-product dependency testing on version or trigger changes, cutting release lead time from ~6 months to ~3 weeks versus manual cross-team verification and email-based escalation.
  • Evolved the Cloud Gate platform on AWS: optimized infrastructure costs while maintaining performance, reliability, and 24/7 go-live support.
  • Owned solution architecture and client-facing technology discussions with customer management and Enterprise Architects; prepared high-level diagrams and delivery proposals.
  • Standardized release documentation, Confluence artifacts, and architectural templates to improve cross-team delivery predictability.
  • Technical Lead (Client: Business Information & Media) | July 2014 - August 2017
  • Led a team of 5 engineers developing the Cloud Gate platform on AWS — cross-team dependency testing, microservice version tracking, automated test orchestration, and stakeholder alerting on failures.
  • As architecture author and demo lead, drove internal adoption of Cloud Gate across Wolters Kluwer departments; reduced release lead time from ~6 months to ~3 weeks through trigger-based cross-product verification.
  • Drove code and design reviews, repository governance, and release management; mentored developers across the team and the Canadian organization.
  • Introduced automated unit and e2e testing with coverage tracking; built Elasticsearch-backed reporting and UI dashboards for operational stakeholders.
  • Facilitated planning with the Product Owner; validated business requirements, estimated delivery, and supported production launches.
  • Senior Software Engineer (Client: Business Information & Media) | January 2011 - June 2014
  • Built core components of the Cloud Gate platform from the ground up: microservice version tracking, automated test orchestration, and results aggregation.
  • Solved complex integration and data-processing problems across distributed services; delivered high-level designs and production-ready implementations under tight delivery constraints.
  • Established early CI/CD and AWS deployment practices for the program; contributed hands-on engineering while transitioning into technical leadership.
  • Created technical documentation, release notes, and knowledge-transfer plans; supported onboarding of new engineers to the codebase.

Education

Master of Technical Sciences
Computer Systems and Networks
Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics, Minsk, Belarus
2012 - 2015
Bachelor
Computational Mathematics and Programming
Francisk Skorina Gomel State University, Gomel, Belarus
2007 - 2012

Certifications

AWS Well-Architected Foundations
AWS Training & Certification (May 2026)
Solution Architect Course
Bridge Lab (2025)
Certified Technical Interviewer
EPAM Systems (2022)
Solution Architect School
EPAM Systems (2020)

Languages

Russian
Native
English
C1 - Advanced
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Alexander Gladchenko
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