About
I’m Vitaly Lyutarevich, CTO, engineer, mentor and grime music promoter.
I am in charge of the engineering department at Dats.Team, a global product company with over 2,000 employees in 32 countries. My department builds high-load systems in SportTech and AdTech, including real-time data processing, video streaming and analytics at scale. I built everything we ship from scratch and took it to production.
My path: Junior Java Developer to CTO in seven years. Along the way, I have worked on banking systems at Raiffeisen Bank, led a LeSS transformation across a few teams and transitioned into product development, which has changed the way I think about engineering.
I have grown four team leads from individual contributors, mentored around ten developers through their career stages and helped QA engineers, analysts and front-end developers make the switch to back-end development. I also started a JVM Languages Community of Excellence within the company, which now has over 70 members who share knowledge and push each other forward.
I care about building teams that can function without me. I care about clean systems that can handle real load. I also care about people growing into roles they didn’t think they could reach.
Outside of tech, I run Grime Over Here (GOH) — Russia’s biggest platform for British electronic music in the grime genre. We have held multiple online events and a live show, and the community is still going strong. Organising music events has taught me more about leadership than any course ever could — the people are harder to manage, there’s a lot of chaos, and nothing ever goes according to plan. I use every skill I picked up running GOH in my day job.
I have an MSc in Computer Science (Information Security) from Omsk State University. Stratoplan CTO School graduate. PSM I certified. I still get my hands dirty with code when it matters.
On this blog, I write about engineering leadership, scaling teams, technical decisions, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.