Systems & Platform Engineering — KaYu Solutions

The systems question is usually the one nobody asks until something breaks.

By then the cost has already been paid: downtime, lost transactions, engineering time spent fighting fires instead of building. What changes is who notices.

Yury has spent fifteen years building infrastructure that doesn’t announce itself: payment systems that process without incident, cloud platforms that provision automatically, services that hold under load and recover cleanly when they don’t. The credential is not the architecture. It’s the absence of the thing that was supposed to go wrong.

What this engagement covers

This is not advisory work. Yury comes in as a principal engineer, diagnosing, designing, and building alongside your team or independently, depending on what the situation requires. Engagements typically involve one or more of:

• Cloud migration, infrastructure recovery, and platform rebuilds
• Deployment automation and operational efficiency
• Payment system integration and financial infrastructure
• Observability, metrics, and real-time monitoring
• Architecture review, security hardening, and regulatory audit preparation

When the previous team walked out

In 2018, Yury joined a Malta-based fintech startup the week before the previous contractor team, who owned the servers, went dark. Completely incommunicado. No handover, no documentation, no access credentials.

What followed was methodical: port scanning to locate company data on infrastructure the previous team controlled, reverse-engineering the codebase from what was recoverable, building a new deployment system from scratch, provisioning new cloud accounts, migrating everything across.

Zero downtime. Zero payments lost.

The platform that existed before had also been built with unencrypted data storage: a blockchain application in banking, files stored as plain binary without encryption. Checksums in place; security not. Yury rebuilt the data layer using encrypted JSON on disk, secure and auditable, built the way a financial application should have been built from the start.

It is a useful illustration of what systemic thinking looks like in practice: not just restoring what was there, but asking what should have been there, and building that instead.

At Amazon Web Services

Five years at AWS EC2 Load Balancing as a Senior Development Engineer. One of the projects: automating new region launches across global AWS infrastructure.

Before, provisioning a new region in a new datacentre took an engineer three to five days of manual work. After: automatic. Per-region configuration, tightened deployment sequencing, updated test pipelines, automated dependency resolution. The project ran with Director-level visibility and achieved a 95% reduction in manual operational work.

For classified US and UK government infrastructure (airgapped, the hardest environment to automate), the reduction was from two weeks to approximately four hours and one conversation with a counterpart on the high side.

The same approach applied to team operations: identifying, codifying, and automating manual procedures across the team’s workflows cut manual engineering work by 50%. The method is consistent: find where people are substituting for systems, understand why, build the system.

The payments thread

Across Oring, Ixaris, and Phoenix Payments, spanning gaming, peer-to-peer money transfer, and fintech, Yury has built and integrated payment infrastructure covering more than twenty payment systems. Multi-currency flows, delayed card authorisation, SEPA processing, partner API integrations, reconciliation reporting.

The recurring pattern: financial flows that need to be correct every time, at volume, across regulatory and currency boundaries. For businesses in travel, hospitality, or any sector where a failed payment is not recoverable with an apology, this experience is most valuable before the build starts.

Regulatory and security

Yury led the technical side of MFSA regulatory audit for a Malta-based payments company, covering resiliency, security architecture, data flows, and operational controls, with a PwC auditor across two days of structured review. The outcome was a clean pass.

The controls that made that possible were built before the audit: multi-layer transaction security, encrypted data in storage and transit, zero-incident deployment pipelines across front and back-end. Compliance is an outcome of how you build, not a process you bolt on at the end.

What you can expect

A small number of engagements at a time. Direct senior involvement from the first conversation. No distance between the person who assesses the problem and the person who solves it.

If you have a systems problem, a platform that needs rebuilding, a migration that needs executing, a payment integration that needs to work, get in touch.