Dmytro Gaivoronsky

🇺🇦 🇺🇸 Engineering leader & builder. 25+ yrs in tech including Google, AWS, and Meta.

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. Some people 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.

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.

I entered the industry through 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. You learned how the internet actually worked because you had to.

2000s: Alta and CQG

At Alta A/S (later acquired by RedPrairie), I worked on large-scale information management systems for automotive production. Our Build to Order solution ran in manufacturing plants for Volkswagen, BMW, Audi, and others.

I spent the next eight years at CQG Inc., going from engineer to team lead to Director of the Ukrainian office. CQG provides trading platforms and market data to professional traders, connecting to over 100 global exchanges. Real-time financial systems where money is on the line taught me what reliability actually means. This was pre-cloud—you built everything yourself.

As director, I grew the Ukrainian R&D office to over 60 people and started an internship program to bring in college graduates. Managing a team that size in a different country while maintaining technical quality was harder than I expected. Lots of lessons learned the hard way.

2010s: Google, AWS, Meta

In the early 2010s I moved to the United States and worked at three of the biggest companies in tech.

At Google, I led engineering teams in Corporate Engineering—the division that runs IT for Google and Alphabet. Internal systems that 30,000+ employees depended on. Some of the most satisfying work was performance optimization: we made critical business processes run 50-100x faster. When you’re building tools for thousands of Googlers, those improvements compound.

At Amazon Web Services, I led teams in CloudFront—AWS’s global CDN with 700+ Points of Presence. We shipped features customers had been asking for since 2008: gzip compression at the edge, ACM certificate integration, WAF integration, HTTPS-only origins. One of the biggest projects was Regional Edge Caches—a mid-tier caching layer for massive video streaming workloads.

We also improved caching performance by 2.5x while cutting hardware costs per request in half. The kind of optimization that matters at CloudFront’s scale. I spent time working directly with major customers—streaming platforms, media companies—helping solve their specific problems, which often informed what we built next.

I then moved to AWS IoT Device Management, where we built Device Registry and Fleet Index (patents here). Systems for organizing and querying IoT fleets at scale. Nestlé uses these to manage 2.8+ million devices across 97 countries. Building something that works for millions of devices while staying fast and affordable as fleets grow—that was the hard part.

At Meta, I led teams working on storage infrastructure managing exabytes of data. The work focused on optimizing storage costs by routing requests to the right tier based on access patterns. This included work on Akkio, Meta’s locality management service.

2020s: Assurance IQ

At Assurance IQ, I joined as Director of Engineering right after Prudential’s $2.35 billion acquisition, later becoming VP of Engineering and then CISO. The company was under 100 people when I started. We grew to 500+ employees plus thousands of licensed agents.

I led about two-thirds of engineering while we transformed how the company operated. Moved from manual AWS operations to automated multi-account Terraform infrastructure. Built platform systems for a national digital insurance marketplace. Shifted the culture from startup chaos to operational reliability—the kind of discipline I learned at Amazon, adapted for a company growing faster than its processes.

After becoming CISO in 2023, I built security and privacy programs from scratch and led the company through SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, and NYDFS audits. Security during hypergrowth is more about culture than technology. You need both the right tools and the right mindset across the company.

In 2024, Prudential wound down Assurance to focus on core insurance businesses. Leading through that arc—startup to acquisition to enterprise operations to wind-down—taught me things you can’t learn any other way.

What’s Next

I’m taking a break from production systems and 3 a.m. pages to recharge. After 25+ years I’m being deliberate about the next chapter. Looking for opportunities where I can help companies scale engineering organizations and build products that matter.

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.

Thanks for reading.