Adrian Volkov CTO
San Francisco, CA • adrian.volkov@gmail.com • +1 415-555-0188
Profile Summary
- CTO with 18 years of experience setting technology direction on developer cloud and frontend infrastructure across edge runtime, build infrastructure, and observability, grown through Staff Engineer, Director, and VP Engineering roles before stepping into the C-suite.
- Working background across languages (TypeScript, Rust), platforms (Next.js, Kubernetes), cloud (AWS), and data (PostgreSQL) so I can hold the architecture conversation with my VP Eng and Principal Engineers without dictating it.
- Deep practice in multi-year technology vision, board and investor communication, engineering org design at scale, and security and compliance oversight, running weekly exec staff and quarterly board updates as the rhythm I operate on.
- Partner closely with the CEO, CPO, CFO, COO, and the board in venture-backed scale-ups between Series C and IPO, carrying the technology voice into company strategy, fundraising, M&A diligence, and customer escalations, and treating the CTO seat as a force-multiplier on the leaders below me.
- Executive who protects a culture of technical excellence and product velocity through written design reviews, public engineering brand, and direct partnership with my VPs, while contributing to a CTO peer roundtable on hiring philosophy, platform direction, and the next wave of AI-native infrastructure.
Technical Skills
- Executive Leadership:
- Board reporting, investor updates, exec team contribution, CEO partnership, technology vision, multi-year roadmap, M&A diligence
- Org Design & Senior Hiring:
- VP and Director hiring, org topology, leveling, succession planning, compensation strategy, workforce planning, remote-first operating models
- Security, Risk & Compliance:
- SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, SecOps oversight, incident command, vulnerability management, data privacy programs
- Languages:
- TypeScript, Rust, Go, Python, SQL
- Frameworks & Platforms:
- Next.js, Kubernetes, React, gRPC, Kafka, edge runtime, serverless
- Cloud & Infrastructure:
- AWS (EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS), Cloudflare, Vercel Edge, Terraform, Datadog, PagerDuty
- Data & Analytics:
- PostgreSQL, Redis, Snowflake, ClickHouse, dbt, Looker
- Budget, Vendor & Capital:
- Annual technology budget, capital allocation, vendor negotiation, build-vs-buy frameworks, cloud cost optimization, partner agreements
Education
University of California, Berkeley
M.S. in Computer Science
Work Experience
Vercel
CTO
- Own the entire technology org of 220 engineers through 3 VPs and 5 Directors reporting in, sit on the exec team alongside the CEO and CPO, and brief the board every quarterly cycle on technology direction, platform risk, and the next wave of infrastructure investment.
- Set the company's 5-year technology direction in a written technology charter, anchored on edge-first runtime and AI-native developer tooling as the two long-horizon bets that the board signed off on, with both bets now driving 62% of ARR and the bulk of new logo acquisition.
- Scaled the engineering org from 70 to 220 across 3 years while restructuring it into a platform plus product lines topology, personally closing 2 VPs and 4 Directors at the senior leadership band and standing up a leveling and compensation framework that holds across the new structure.
- Set the architectural principle of edge-by-default, region-by-exception across the platform, backed the WASM-based isolate runtime as the long-horizon platform bet, ran the build runtime, buy observability call with the VPs, and landed p95 cold start under 50ms across the customer base.
- Partner with the CPO in a weekly product-eng exec sync on multi-quarter platform sequencing, co-led the AI SDK general availability launch end-to-end from technical readiness through go-to-market, and saw 3x enterprise adoption across the four quarters that followed.
- Hold ultimate accountability for security and data privacy, hired the VP Security reporting to me, sponsored SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and the GDPR and CCPA compliance programs that unlocked enterprise deals, and posted zero customer-impacting breaches across the tenure.
- Own the $48M annual technology budget, renegotiated the AWS enterprise agreement and landed $6.2M in annual savings through reserved capacity and a multi-year discount, and 22% reallocated of R&D capex toward the AI-tooling bet with CFO and board backing.
PlanetScale
VP Engineering
- Stood up the company's first dedicated R&D function around the serverless database engine, pulled 12 engineers out of the core roadmap to run year-long exploratory bets on Vitess sharding and branching, and shipped two of those bets into the commercial product on the back of 2 patents granted.
- Represented the engineering brand externally on stage at QCon and KubeCon and through bylined pieces in TechCrunch and The New Stack, using the surface area to feed senior recruiting and enterprise pipeline, which by the end of my tenure covered 40% of enterprise pipeline sourced through technical brand.
- Wrote and shipped the engineering operating manual that codified the culture, made written design reviews the gating step before any platform commit, and held 94% senior retention across the manual's first two years in force.
- Sat on the exec team as the technology voice through the Series C raise, co-authored the tech diligence pack for lead investors, walked the technical hour of every diligence call alongside the CEO, and closed the round at $50M with a strong-conviction lead.