About
Hello there! My name is Dmytro Gaivoronsky and this is my personal site. I’m Ukrainian 🇺🇦. I was born in Kyiv and now I’m living in Seattle, Washington, United States 🇺🇸. Some people may know me as Dmitry, which is an anglicized spelling of the same name.
1980s-2000s: Learning to Build
My journey with computers started in the mid-80s, watching my father solder together a Radio-86RK ham computer using schematics from a Soviet radio amateur magazine. That homemade machine was my first playground. I started with Basic, then moved through Pascal, C, and C++. Over the years I picked up Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, and the usual mix of shell scripts and Perl. The first twenty years were about figuring out I was an engineer and learning how to be one - soldering, programming, hacking, and building things.
I entered the industry by dabbling in system administration and web development. Working for a small web shop in the late 90s and early 2000s was the perfect environment to learn - FreeBSD, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Perl CGI scripts, DNS, sendmail, IP tables, and everything else you needed to keep websites running. Dial-up connections, colocated servers, and hand-crafted HTML taught me how the internet actually worked.
2000s: Alta and CQG
At Alta A/S (later acquired by RedPrairie), I worked as an engineer on large-scale information management systems for automotive production automation. Our Build to Order solution ran in manufacturing plants for Volkswagen, BMW, Audi, and other major automotive manufacturers.
I spent the next eight years at CQG Inc.. I started as an engineer, became a team lead, and eventually took on the director role for the Ukrainian office. CQG provides trading platforms and market data to professional traders worldwide, connecting to the majority of global exchanges - over 100 venues including CME, CBOT, NYMEX, NYSE, Eurex, SGX, HKEX, and many others across futures, options, equities, forex, and fixed income markets.
Working on realtime financial information analysis and exchange trading software at this scale significantly advanced my understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and what reliability really means when money is on the line. All in the pre-cloud era when you had to build everything yourself. The scale, complexity, and mission-critical nature of the business deepened my grasp of software development processes, quality metrics, and how to lead teams building systems that can’t afford to fail.
2010s: Google, AWS, Meta
This path brought me from Ukraine to the United States, where I worked at three of the biggest companies in tech: Google, Amazon Web Services, and Meta.
At Google, I led teams in Corporate Engineering - the division that runs IT for Google and Alphabet. We built and maintained the internal systems that keep the company running: finance management, employee productivity tools, infrastructure, and everything else that 30,000+ employees depend on to do their jobs.
At Amazon Web Services, I spent several years leading engineering teams in CloudFront - AWS’s global content delivery network with 700+ Points of Presence serving hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. One of the biggest projects introduced Regional Edge Caches, a mid-tier caching layer that enabled CloudFront to serve massive customers like Amazon Prime Video streaming to 18 million+ viewers.
I then moved to lead teams in AWS IoT Device Management, where we built Device Registry and Fleet Index (patents here) - systems that let customers organize, search, and monitor IoT fleets ranging from thousands to millions of devices. Nestlé uses these to manage 2.8+ million devices across 97 countries. Industrial manufacturers connect entire factory floors. The challenge was building a system that could index and query millions of devices while remaining fast and cost-effective as fleets grew exponentially.
At Meta, I led teams working on storage infrastructure managing exabytes of data for billions of users worldwide. The work focused on optimizing storage costs by intelligently routing requests to the appropriate storage tier and backend system based on access patterns and data lifecycle. This included work on Akkio, Meta’s locality management service that optimizes data placement and access patterns across the distributed storage infrastructure.
2020s: Assurance IQ
At Assurance IQ, I joined as Director of Engineering after Prudential’s $2.35 billion acquisition, later becoming Vice President of Engineering and then Chief Information Security Officer. I led infrastructure, platform engineering, application security, and privacy functions. The company was less than 100 people when I started. Over the next few years, we grew to 500+ employees across separate subsidiaries, plus thousands of licensed agents - explosive growth that required building systems and culture to match.
I led roughly two-thirds of the engineering organization through a transformation from scrappy startup to operational excellence. We moved from manual AWS operations to automated multi-account Terraform infrastructure. We built platform systems to support a national digital insurance marketplace combining data science with thousands of agents serving millions of customers. Most importantly, we defined an operational excellence culture - making systems reliable, establishing processes that scaled, and influencing the company to operate more like Amazon than the chaotic startup we’d been.
As CISO, I led the company through SOC 2, PCI, and NYDFS compliance audits. Building security and privacy programs during hypergrowth taught me that compliance is more about culture and process than just technology.
In 2024, Prudential decided to wind down Assurance as part of a strategic shift to focus on its core insurance businesses. Building a platform that served millions of shoppers and grew revenue to over $550M taught me lessons about hypergrowth, operational excellence, and leading large-scale transformations.
What’s Next
These days I’m taking a break from production systems and 3am pages to recharge. I’m climbing peaks and alpine rock routes with my kids, playing with new technologies, and building tools for myself. I’m exploring what comes next while staying connected to the work I love. Turns out there’s a whole world out there that doesn’t require an on-call rotation.
You can check out my LinkedIn profile or browse my repositories on github.com.
Thank you for reading.