Kirill Plotnikov

Software Engineering Leader

Shaping systems and the teams behind them with a steady hand.

Long before engineering, I was a calligraphy and lettering artist exhibiting in Europe and Asia. The work taught me that every stroke matters, every mistake is permanent, and simplicity takes the most practice.

My first engineering role was at an ad tech company, where I spent several years building services, managing infrastructure end to end, and designing my first billing system. It gave me a habit of owning everything — from architecture to deployment, from cost planning to configuring infrastructure, from the first release to a system that stops waking you up.

A few years ago I joined Yandex Cloud as a backend engineer, drawn by the scale of its real-time metering system that processes hundreds of thousands of events per second, with a major technology migration underway. Eventually, I stepped in to lead the team and inherited a challenge: a fragile legacy platform at its performance limit, and an under-resourced group with unclear system ownership. I rebuilt the team, the processes, the codebase, and the operational culture around it. That work became the foundation for expanding my scope from one engineering team to the entire Billing department.

I still write code when it matters, and I still pick up a pen when I need to think.

Head of Billing Engineering at Yandex Cloud

I lead a cross-functional department of more than thirty software and infrastructure engineers, system analysts, and managers across six teams, responsible for the real-time billing platform that powers the business. Every cent of the company’s revenue flows through the systems we build and operate.

Today the central work is a ground-up architectural, technological, and organizational transformation of Billing, all without disrupting the live system or the business it serves. This means investing as much in operational excellence, documentation, and people development as in architecture and code.

The vision is a billing platform so reliable, flexible, and well-designed that it becomes invisible to everyone who depends on it, sustained by a team that can hold that standard long after any single person leaves.