Serhii Franchuk
EU-based · Open to advisory & fractional work
SOFTWARE & AI SYSTEMS ARCHITECT

Resilient platforms,
shipped under real load.

I architect multi-region, high-load systems — and accelerate delivery with AI agents, with a human owning every decision.

View Selected Work
30-min call · no pitch · a concrete next step you can act on.
  • 14+ yrs in software
  • Multi-region platforms
  • High-throughput systems
  • Led engineering teams
Portrait of Serhii Franchuk, Software & AI Systems Architect
TRUSTED ACROSS
PlaysonPlaytikaDMND.games
// WHAT I’M KNOWN FOR

Systems where latency, consistency, and failover are non-negotiable — and governance is designed in, not bolted on.

01Multi-region failover
active-active · geo-routing · Cloudflare
02Event-driven platforms
Kafka · CQRS · event sourcing
03High-throughput systems
low latency · high availability
04Cloud infrastructure
AWS · Kubernetes · Terraform · FluxCD
05Observability
Datadog · Grafana · SLOs
06AI-assisted delivery
agentic workflows · OpenSpec
07Engineering leadership
teams up to 20+
08Security by design
IRSA · ABAC · secure CI/CD
// 01 — SERVICES

Architecture and execution support for complex software platforms.

S/01

Architecture Assessment

Find bottlenecks, risks, coupling, failure modes, and delivery blockers before they reach production.

S/02

Multi-region Platform Design

Design failover, traffic steering, consistency strategies, observability, and safe operations across regions.

S/03

AI-Assisted Delivery

Build agentic workflows for planning, coding, reviews, testing, documentation, and automation.

S/04

Cloud & DevOps Review

Improve Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, security posture, monitoring, and cost efficiency.

S/05

Fractional Architect

Hands-on architecture leadership for teams that need senior technical direction.

S/06

Engineering Coaching

Help engineers unblock complex technical decisions and raise system design quality.

// 02 — SELECTED WORK

Distributed systems that had to stay up.

Playson

iGaming · Platform
Multi-region iGaming platform modernization

Contributed to the evolution from a C++ monolith into a large microservices platform — geo-routing, failover flows, cross-region context transfer, consistency strategies, observability, and production ownership.

400+ microservices / cluster7.5k+ tx/sec100ms platform time99.99% availabilityMulti-regionKafkaClickHouse

DMND.games

Startup · Real-time
Real-time game backend and cloud infrastructure

Designed and operated backend services, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, alerting, and abuse / DDoS response for a fast-moving startup environment.

AWSCloudflareKafkaES / KibanaDDoS response

Playtika

Social casino · High-load
High-load social casino product features

Delivered backend features for Caesars Casino — event-driven high-load product mechanics and production stability work on the Java / Spring Boot ecosystem.

Java / Spring BootCouchbaseApache StormHadoop

Open Source

Kafka · node-rdkafka
Kafka cooperative rebalance contribution

Contributed Cooperative Rebalance support (PR #1081) to node-rdkafka, reinforcing deep Kafka and distributed-systems expertise.

View PR #1081 →Kafka Streams
// 03 — METHOD

From unclear technical risk to production-ready architecture.

  1. 01
    Diagnose

    Read the codebase, traffic, and incidents to find the real blockers.

  2. 02
    Model

    Model load, data flows, consistency, and the failure modes that bite.

  3. 03
    Design

    Resilient architecture with trade-offs written down, not implied.

  4. 04
    Ship

    Incremental rollout behind flags, with a tested rollback path.

  5. 05
    Observe

    SLO dashboards and Datadog / Grafana monitors that trigger real action.

  6. 06
    Automate with AI

    Encode delivery into agentic, repeatable workflows.

// 04 — AI ENGINEERING

AI-assisted delivery, owned by a human architect.

I use AI agents to take on the unglamorous 80% of delivery — planning, implementation, review, tests, and docs — so senior time goes to the decisions that actually need judgment. The pipeline below is how that runs.

AGENTIC DELIVERY PIPELINE
ContextSpecPlanImplementReviewTestShipObserve
Plan mode
Claude · Cursor
Role workflows
Subagents
OpenSpec
Change mgmt
Agent APIs
Automation
// 05 — TECH DEPTH

The distributed-systems stack I run in production.

The layers I design, own, and operate — follow the signal from the edge down to security.

REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE · LAYERS I OWNrequest flow
L1Edge & Routing
Get every user to the nearest healthy region — and steer traffic away from failure before they notice.
CloudflareGeo-routingDynamic steeringFailover routing
L2Compute & Orchestration
Reproducible, self-healing infrastructure defined as code — multi-AZ by default.
KubernetesAWS (EKS)Terraform
L3Services & APIs
Loosely-coupled services behind typed, versioned contracts.
Node.jsNestJSSpring BootgRPC
L4Eventing & Data
An event-driven core with replayable state and deliberate consistency between services.
KafkaKafka StreamsCQRSEvent Sourcing
L5Observability
SLO-driven signals and dashboards tuned to catch real incidents early.
DatadogGrafanaElasticsearchKibanaSLO / SLI
L6Security & Governance
Least-privilege access and a verifiable software supply chain, with governance built in from the first diagram.
IRSAABACRBACTrivySecure CI/CDSupply-chain
CROSS-CUTTING · LANGUAGES
JavaGoTypeScriptJavaScriptPythonC++
CROSS-CUTTING · AI ENGINEERING
Claude / AnthropicCursorMCPOpenSpecSubagents
// 06 — ABOUT

Hands-on architect with research roots and production scars.

I started in science, working with sensors, bare-metal microcontrollers, and data-acquisition systems. That early work taught me a standard I still apply today: take something noisy, complex, and unpredictable, and make it reliable enough for real decisions.

Since then I've built across the stack: mobile and desktop apps, frontend systems, high-load backend platforms, games, big-data pipelines, and the CI/CD infrastructure behind them. I've worked in early-stage startups and established product companies, where architecture has to survive real users, real traffic, and real business pressure.

Over time, my focus moved toward the harder end of software engineering: geo-distributed platforms, live replication, cross-region user-data transfer, Kafka-based event systems, and cloud-native products taken from zero to production.

What keeps me in the field is the difficulty. I like problems where the answer is not obvious, the trade-offs matter, and the system has to keep working after the first clean diagram is gone. I stay close to modern tooling, including AI agents, but I believe the important decisions still need human ownership.

My priority is to get the architecture right early, so the business can grow on it without needing a rewrite when scale, reliability, or requirements change.

14+
years in software
20+
engineers led
7.5k+
tx/sec
EU
based & available

Have a platform, delivery process, or AI workflow that needs senior eyes?

In 30 minutes we'll pressure-test your architecture or delivery bottleneck and leave you with 2–3 specific, prioritized moves — whether or not we work together.

Typically responds within 24h · EU business hours