The CTO is the driving force behind all tech companies’ processes.
And we are excited to announce Veaceslav Gaidarji as the new Chief Technology Officer at Orangesoft!
With over a decade of experience combining engineering and management, Veaceslav brings expertise in building high-performing teams and delivering quality solutions.
Veaceslav's obsession with automation, customer satisfaction, and all things open-source makes him a perfect fit for our team.
As CTO, he'll lead our engineering efforts, optimize processes, and execute long-term strategies to ensure Orangesoft remains at the forefront of innovation.
The Orangesoft Blog sat down with Veaceslav to talk about his past and the future of the company under his leadership.
Q: What's your path to Orangesoft's CTO?
I started my career as an Android engineer in 2011. It’s been a fun time, and I’ve been lucky to work on some challenging projects like a custom Android ROM, a custom system launcher application, and many others.
Starting in 2017, my career took a turn into a management track, and I’ve been involved less in actual coding and more in managing engineering teams. It’s been a natural path for me because, with every new company and role change, I was more interested in dealing with people and organizing processes. For the next five years, I experienced exponential growth at Crunchyroll, which is the #1 anime streaming service. I went from starting with a small team of ten Android engineers to leading the whole Engineering department responsible for all client application development (5 teams and up to 50 engineers).
In the fall of 2022, I decided to take a break and think through what I wanted to do next. After a short break, I was fully set for solving both high-level managerial challenges and complex technical tasks. Stars aligned — and I ended up at Orangesoft as the CTO.
Q: How would you describe your role and what are you hoping to accomplish at Orangesoft?
The CTO role at any company is at the intersection of business and engineering. My role is to connect both worlds, establish processes for efficient work and cooperation between departments, define and execute long-term strategy, and build a world-class organization known for quality and high professionalism. Coming from a mature product company, I have a unique opportunity to cultivate a product engineering mindset to develop solutions both clients and end users will be proud of.
Q: What do you find most challenging about being a CTO?
The most challenging part of my role is to constantly switch contexts into very different domains and remain productive. It’s also important to build strong expertise in chosen domains and not spread too thin into “we specialize in everything.” There are so many things in motion, and technology, in particular, is constantly evolving (new frameworks, new programming languages, new application architectures, AI applications everywhere, etc.). While not everything that comes up is really “new” these days, the new versions of the technologies require careful analysis and research before they are adopted.
Q: What are your priorities for the first few months as the CTO?
My top priorities for the next few months are:
- Meet the team and form a strong connection with people.
- Define the short-, mid-, and long-term strategies for the Engineering departments and start executing them.
- Closely collaborate with the C-level, provide support, and identify areas of improvement across the organization.
- Identify various process improvements and prepare the plan for their implementation. This includes Engineering processes and working with Marketing, HR, Sales, and other teams on the ways things are done today and what would be more optimal ways to get the job done, especially from an engineering perspective.
Q: What do you think your biggest challenges and opportunities will be in your new role?
I think the biggest opportunity is to build a next-level world-class organization with the amazing teams Orangesoft has today and the new hires we will have in the future. This includes a tight focus on quality standards and automation, effective communication and knowledge sharing, a culture of innovation, and giving back to the community.
The biggest challenge is to keep everyone connected and organized in a remote-first environment.
Q: What is your leadership style, and how do you plan to foster a culture of collaboration and excellence within the engineering team?
I pretty much lead by example. I tend to build teams on full trust, transparency, and a sense of ownership. Being obsessed with quality and work automation, I’m always seeking ways to improve every aspect of the company's work. To foster a culture of collaboration and excellence, the best you can do is share knowledge within the organization. It can be achieved through various meetups, R&D projects, shared knowledge base spaces, common channels, and other ways. People love to come together and discuss something they are personally very passionate about, and there’s always something people in tech are passionate about.
Q: Are there any specific areas of technology or innovation that you are particularly passionate about?
I'm a long-time CI/CD and tooling fan. Well-organized CI/CD pipelines and automation boost developers’ productivity, reduce manual work, improve quality, and help with deployment predictability. Plus, it’s just nice to see the green checks, you know.
Q: How has mobile app development changed in recent years? What do you think will be the future of mobile technology?
Thanks to the engineering community and big companies' innovation in every aspect of mobile app development, what we have today is a very mature development environment. Programming languages used in modern mobile application development are very convenient (Swift, Kotlin), have an easier learning curve, and have very mature infrastructure. IDEs are smart and speed up development by a lot. A movement towards declarative UI frameworks and a huge number of open-source frameworks help build new applications faster and maintain proper separation of concerns. Cross-platform frameworks, like Kotlin Multiplatform and Flutter, are getting adopted by more and more companies. I think their adoption will only increase with time as the applications built using those technologies are saving development time, and the performance of the applications doesn’t suffer drastically as if it would with other popular frameworks like React Native.
