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 live in Seattle, Washington, United States 🇺🇸. Some people may know me as Dmitry, which is an anglicized spelling of the same name.
I’ve spent 25+ years building teams and products at companies like Google, AWS, Meta, and high-growth startups. Along the way I’ve led organizations through hypergrowth, shipped products serving billions of users, and learned what it takes to transform engineering culture while delivering real business results.
1980s-2000s: Learning to Build
My journey with computers started in the mid-80s when I watched 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 that 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, iptables, 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., progressing from engineer to team lead to Director of the Ukrainian office. CQG provides trading platforms and market data to professional traders worldwide, connecting to over 100 global exchanges including CME, CBOT, NYMEX, NYSE, Eurex, SGX, HKEX, and many others across futures, options, equities, forex, and fixed income markets.
Working on real-time 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.
As director, I helped to grow the Ukrainian R&D office to over 60 people and created an internship program to bring in the best and brightest college graduates.
2010s: Google, AWS, Meta
In early 2010s I moved 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 engineering teams in Corporate Engineering - the division that runs IT for Google and Alphabet. We built and maintained the internal systems that kept the company running: finance management, employee productivity tools, infrastructure, and everything else that 30,000+ employees depended on to do their jobs. Some of the most satisfying work was performance optimization - we made critical business processes run 50-100x faster and improved application load times by over 40%. When you’re building tools for thousands of Googlers, those improvements compound quickly. We also established processes for release planning and design reviews that became standards across the division.
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. We shipped features customers had been asking for since 2008, like gzip compression at the edge, ACM certificate integration that made SSL/TLS adoption much easier, WAF integration, HTTPS-only origins, and configurable origin protocols. One of the biggest projects introduced Regional Edge Caches - a mid-tier caching layer that enabled CloudFront to serve massive video streaming workloads to millions of concurrent viewers.
Beyond new features, we focused heavily on operational excellence. We improved caching system performance by 2.5x while cutting hardware costs in half per request - the kind of optimization that matters when you’re operating at CloudFront’s scale. I also spent time working directly with major customers - streaming platforms, media companies, and others - helping solve their technical problems, which often influenced what we built next. There’s something satisfying about turning around an at-risk account by diving deep into their specific performance issues and actually fixing them.
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 right after Prudential’s $2.35 billion acquisition, later becoming Vice President of Engineering and then Chief Information Security Officer. The company was less than 100 people when I started. Over the next few years, we grew to 500+ employees across multiple subsidiaries, plus thousands of licensed agents - the kind of explosive growth that tests everything you think you know about building systems and organizations.
I led roughly two-thirds of the engineering organization while transforming the way the whole Assurance operated. We moved from manual AWS operations to automated multi-account Terraform infrastructure supporting multiple business lines. We built platform systems for a national digital insurance marketplace that combined data science, agent workflows, and customer-facing applications serving millions of shoppers. Most importantly, we shifted the culture from startup chaos to operational excellence - bringing the kind of reliability and process discipline I learned at Amazon to a hypergrowth environment. The engineering teams I led delivered carrier integration platforms that generated double-digit millions in annual recurring revenue, building the technical foundation for a marketplace that grew to over $550M in revenue.
After becoming CISO in 2023, I built up enterprise security and privacy programs and led the company through SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, and NYDFS cybersecurity regulation audits. Building security and compliance programs during hypergrowth taught me that these things are more about culture and organizational design than just technology - you need both the right tools and the right mindset across the entire company.
In 2024, Prudential decided to wind down Assurance as part of a strategic shift to focus on core insurance businesses. Leading through that scale of transformation - from startup through acquisition integration to enterprise operations - taught me invaluable lessons about organizational change, executive decision-making, and what it really takes to build systems that support explosive growth.
What’s Next
These days I’m taking a break from production systems and 3 a.m. pages to recharge and think about what comes next - after 25+ years in tech I’m being deliberate about the next chapter. I’m interested in opportunities where I can help companies scale their engineering organizations, drive operational transformations, and build products that matter. The right role is one where engineering excellence creates real business impact.
In the meantime, I’m climbing alpine routes with my kids, playing with new technologies, and building tools for myself.
You can check out my LinkedIn profile or browse my repositories on github.com.
Thank you for reading.