Ilya Shupta
Tech Lead
& Senior Software Engineer
14 years of building software that has to keep working—a road that runs from Siberia through Singapore to Amsterdam, from real-time medical systems for doctors to cross-company platform integration. These days I lead a team, modernize legacy systems, and keep production boring.
The Journey
Scaling the Organization
Tech Lead/Hubs · Protolabs Network /Amsterdam /2023 – present
I joined Hubs as it became part of Protolabs, a US digital-manufacturing leader, and now lead a team of seven while coordinating delivery across four collaborating teams. The work: migrating legacy Python APIs to an event-driven architecture, running cross-company integrations across Python and Rust services, and the kind of reliability engineering that shows up as twelve months without a single migration incident.
Zero to One
Founding Engineer/Bot MD (YC S18) /Singapore /2017 – 2023
Joined in 2017 as the first engineering hire. Spent the YC Summer 2018 batch hacking in a Silicon Valley garage with our CEO, CTO, and two other engineers I brought from Siberia, then relocated to Singapore to scale a medical digital assistant for doctors. We navigated Series A funding and built amazing software for local hospitals, including cancer treatment calculators and AI chatbots for hospital information and doctor queries.
Building the Practice
Freelance Web Developer/Upwork & direct clients /Novosibirsk /2014 – 2017
Switched to freelance web development, building Python backends for real-time communication apps and sophisticated web scraping engines. Focused on frontend work in JavaScript and dockerizing infrastructure for scalable deployments. The interactive chat portfolio from 2016 (preserved below) is a technical statement from this brutally competitive era.
Systems & Foundations
Junior Software Engineer/Center of Navigation Technologies /Novosibirsk /2012 – 2014
Started my career after university at one of the country's most popular GPS navigation companies. Focused on C++ embedded development and the internals of a custom standard library used across the project's ecosystem. This era bred a methodical approach to software: building core internals from the ground up.
The Archives
2016 Interactive Portfolio
The Freelance Era
Every tech lead starts somewhere. In 2016, trying to break through the highly competitive freelance market, I built a fully-interactive, real-time WebSocket chat application to secure client contracts. It remains a beloved part of my history, structurally modernized and preserved here—and still wired up: messages land straight in my Telegram.
Open the 2016 chat — say hi →