Ilya Shupta
Senior Software Engineer
& Engineering Lead
I specialize in scaling engineering organizations, modernizing legacy systems, and driving IT-first transformations from the ground up. Over a decade of engineering high-stakes software—from early systems internals in Siberia and scaling medical tech in Singapore to leading global integration in Amsterdam.
The Journey
Scaling the Organization
Tech Lead/Amsterdam /2023 – present
Joining a startup through its acquisition by a global US digital manufacturing leader, I lead the architectural initiatives that unify our disparate engineering divisions. My work is about building the "connective tissue"—both technical and organizational—that allows a large-scale enterprise to move with the speed of a startup. From driving cross-company systems integration to scaling our delivery culture, I focus on the high-stakes engineering that turns a global operation into a high-velocity product machine.
Zero to One
Founding Engineer/Singapore /2018 – 2023
YC Summer 2018 batch. Spent two months in Silicon Valley hacking in a garage with our CEO, CTO, and two other engineers I brought from Siberia. I moved 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/Novosibirsk /2014 – 2018
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/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.
View the 2016 Chat App →