A journey in tech

I'm originally from Yekaterinburg, Russia — an industrial city in the Urals — born shortly after the fall of the USSR. My interest in technology started early, and it wasn't an accident: I was surrounded by family who worked in factories and in electrical engineering. Machines, wiring diagrams, and the people who kept them running were the background noise of my childhood.

In 2001, my family moved to the southern United States. Through school I stayed obsessed with technology and engineering — I would spend hours drawing technical diagrams, first on paper, then on computers. By 2008 I was teaching myself programming over dial-up internet, which is its own kind of patience training.

The game that started a career

2009 was a busy year. I started high school and began working on an online multiplayer game called Crystal Legends Online: Rise of the Legends — development, moderation, and eventually the infrastructure. I ended up buying real equipment to host it: servers, storage, network gear. That hardware taught me more about systems engineering than any course could have.

At the same time I joined the Academy of Information Technology (AOIT), a high-school program where students maintained the education technology across the campus — I led a team of 25+ students and administered a campus-wide Novell network before I could vote. The program was run by one of my first IT mentors, and he drilled a phrase into us that I still teach to my teams today:

"Check, re-check, check again." — C. Owens

The hosting years

In 2012 my friends and I went off to college and the game's development stopped. The gear, however, remained — and in July of that year, Universal Hosting was founded on it. We hosted cPanel services, applications, and dedicated servers for customers, and I ran the company for the next twelve years alongside everything else.

In 2015 I joined Chevron Oronite as a system administrator, supporting both the office network and the process-control systems of a working petrochemical plant. That job is where my respect for industrial control systems — and the security discipline they demand — was earned firsthand.

Enterprise scale

In 2019 I joined DXC Technology, and the same year I founded Nubinity, LLC, a managed services and connectivity provider. At DXC I moved from senior DevOps engineering through solution architecture, ITAR cloud operations leadership, people management of 30+ engineers and architects, and client technology leadership for large healthcare and retail accounts — to my current role as a Sr. Enterprise Architect in the Enterprise IT / AI Enablement Group.

Today I split my time between enterprise technology leadership, running Nubinity, research, and writing here. The through-line from a post-Soviet childhood surrounded by engineers to Fortune 500 architecture reviews is simpler than it looks: I like understanding how systems really work, and I like being accountable for them.

I am Pavel. And that's my story — so far.