Mykola Nesov

Mykola Nesov.

Engineering teams that ship with AI — built on process, not heroics.

Lead Software Engineer · Mayven Studios · Paris

Twelve years shipping software with international teams. Eight of them leading engineering at Mayven Studios — Senior in 2018, Lead since 2020.

Most weeks my job isn't code. It's the review standards, release procedures, decision docs, and automations that keep a team fast.

How I help

Install the guardrails. Code-review standards, release procedures, and the SOPs written down so the next engineer doesn't have to ask. CI/CD hardening and the automations that make it stick.

Ship without surprises. Pre-launch risk reviews, rollback playbooks, production monitoring — for teams that have outgrown "deploy and hope".

Fold AI into the team, not the demo. Where LLM tooling actually saves hours on real client work, where it doesn't, and how to measure the difference.

Speak to the client for the team. Translate engineering trade-offs into decisions a founder or product owner can actually make.

Experience

Mayven Studios· San Francisco · remote from France

Dec 2018 – Present

Lead Software Engineer

Oct 2020 – Present
  • Technical decision-making and formalising development procedures.
  • Introducing AI tooling and agents into the team's pipeline — code review, refactors, release prep, observability, and bug reporting — so the team spends time on decisions, not repetition.
  • Closing the automation loop: AI carries the grind, humans stay in the decision seats.
  • Production launch control — feature-flag-driven rollouts, controlled experiments, and disciplined risk mitigation.
  • Code review and maintaining engineering best practices.
  • Coordinating and motivating the team.
  • Client, cross-team, and cross-department communication — including consulting on complex engineering decisions across the studio.

Senior Software Engineer

Dec 2018 – Oct 2020
  • Application architecture; planning, developing, and scaling projects.
  • Refactoring legacy code toward Clean Architecture and Hexagonal (ports-and-adapters) patterns.
  • Implementing Domain-Driven Design — from ubiquitous language through to the application itself.
  • REST and GraphQL APIs serving Vue, Nuxt, and Ionic/Capacitor clients.
  • Third-party integrations spanning payments, ERP, marketing, search, and real-time — owned end-to-end, monitored, documented.

Shipped with: PHP · Laravel · TypeScript · Vue · Nuxt · Vite · Ionic · Capacitor · Tailwind · MySQL · Redis · AWS · Cloudflare Workers · R2 · KV · Zero Trust · Docker · GitHub Actions · CircleCI · Stripe · Braintree · NetSuite · Klaviyo · Algolia · Amplitude · Ably · Bugsnag · New Relic · Pest · Vitest · Cypress · Playwright · Claude Code · Codex · MCP

Upwork

2007 – 2022

Freelance Software Engineer

  • Full-cycle delivery for international clients — architecting, building, shipping, and supporting 20+ products over 15 years.
  • 7,000+ hours logged; passed the coding challenge into Upwork's Premium Pool (top tier) in 2017.
  • Every engagement was a one-person consultancy — finding clients, scoping, pricing, delivering, and holding a 5-star score across thousands of hours. Sales, service, and communication as much as engineering.

Shipped with: PHP · Laravel · Symfony · JavaScript · TypeScript · Node · React · Vue · Next.js · Nuxt · Gatsby · Tailwind · Vite · GraphQL · REST · PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · Redis · Docker · AWS · Cloudflare Workers · Heroku · DigitalOcean · GitHub Actions · Cypress · Stripe · PayPal

Radiate Digital· Minneapolis, MN · remote from Ukraine

Jan 2015 – Oct 2019

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 2017 – Oct 2019
  • Application architecture on Laravel and Symfony stacks across multiple client products.
  • Grew the team by introducing new technologies.
  • Planning, developing, and scaling agency engagements end-to-end.

Software Engineer

Jan 2015 – Apr 2017
  • Shipped Laravel-based applications for agency clients; first exposure to multi-client delivery at scale.

Shipped with: PHP · Laravel · Symfony · JavaScript · MySQL · PostgreSQL · Redis · Docker · AWS · Heroku · Stripe

Joy Telecom· London, UK · remote from Ukraine

Jan 2013 – Jan 2015

Senior PHP Developer

  • Shipped a responsive web application on top of A2Billing — a complete VoIP platform serving residential, business, and wholesale voice.
  • Payment integrations: PayPal, 2Checkout, Ukash.
  • Geo-location services for call routing.

Shipped with: PHP · Zend Framework · JavaScript · MySQL · Linux · Apache · A2Billing · Asterisk · PayPal · 2Checkout · Ukash

Education

Languages

Ukrainian

Native

English

Professional working proficiency

French

Intermediate

Volunteer

Escape Crimea

since 2014

Founder & Developer

Human rights advocacy platform.

Viegraph

Software Engineer

Vital-signs AI that reads physiological signals to surface a person's real emotional state.

What people say

Top 1% Expert Vetted talent on Upwork, with 100% client satisfaction over 8 years. He treats the business's wins and failures as his own.
Katerina Bozhkova · Marketing Professional · Community Management · International Growth
Really good at taking business requirements and building a solution for them. Solid at software architecture, coding, decision making, and communication.
Steve Swearengin · Cofounder and CEO of Torchable

Writing

  • The workspace before the agents

    The teams getting the most out of AI coding assistants aren't the ones with the fanciest prompts. They did the boring work first.