Engineer first. Everything else follows.
I'm Evgeny, or Eugene for English speakers who'd rather not wrestle with the pronunciation, a product and software architect with sixteen years in the industry and the last seven leading the teams that build the products. Software was never the goal for me, the product is, and working code is just the way to get there. Today I head software at Gatewise, a US proptech company, where I took an R&D org from careful AI experiments to agents that write production code every day.
birch is where I do this work independently, helping engineering leaders rebuild how their teams operate, and getting into the codebase myself when that is the fastest way to move a product forward. What I care about is not architecture diagrams or language wars, it is building teams and processes where AI agents carry real work, so a small group of engineers can ship a product that stays stable under load and does not burn money on infrastructure it does not need.
The path here
Started in software
Fullstack and mobile development, building for the web and for phones, learning every part of the stack by doing it myself.
First team lead
Ten engineers building APIs and data services on Node, Go and AWS, my first taste of owning delivery end to end.
Leading R&D
Thirty plus engineers across web, mobile, QA and DevOps at a global delivery company, and my first real work on making an R&D org run better, not just bigger.
Head of Software
Created the whole R&D from scratch and optimized it for AI, spec-driven, measured, and adopted for real.
birch
Helping companies and R&D leaders build an effective R&D from the ground up, or rethink the processes they already have and adapt them to AI-first work.
How I work
Dialogue before contracts
The first conversations are free and unhurried, I want to see how your R&D actually runs before either of us signs anything, and sometimes the honest answer is you don't need me yet.
Process, then plan
My work is about how your R&D operates, not about writing code for you, though if you need a quick MVP to get moving I can help with that too. We define the problem, agree on what a good result looks like, weigh the ways to get there, see what stands in the way, and turn that into a plan that removes those obstacles one by one, from rebuilding existing processes to setting up AI-first work from scratch.
Honest "I don't know"
I'd rather tell you where my certainty ends than sell confidence I don't have, that is the only way advice stays worth paying for. And when a problem needs knowledge outside mine, I know which specialists to bring in and how to put together the right team to solve it.
Away from the keyboard, I'm usually outdoors with my family, hiking in the mountains, running ultramarathons and fishing. The name birch is simply my last name, Bereza means birch.