Mikita Hrybaleu

CTO @ Zendrop. 20+ years shipping platforms that scale. Advisory for seed‑to‑Series B founders.

Connect

Two moments founders come to me for: shipping an MVP before the next round, or holding a platform together through the next 10x.

I help you pick the bet, then lead the build.

About

Originally from Eastern Europe, so I tend to appreciate directness. Now in West Palm Beach, FL. I started in gaming distribution and payments, moved through e-commerce, and now lead engineering at Zendrop, the dropshipping platform with 300K+ connected stores.

20+ years of building and shipping. The common thread: take something that's breaking under growth, figure out what actually matters, fix that, skip the rest. The domains change, the pattern doesn't.

fintechcrowdfundingprocurementdropshipping

Outside of Zendrop I mentor founders, judge the occasional hackathon, and write short pieces about what I learn from shipping — no theory, no marketing. Inside Zendrop I'm building an AI-first engineering team in West Palm Beach — if you've rebuilt your workflow around AI, I want to hear from you.

Advisory

Usually someone reaches out because something's breaking and they're not sure if it's the code, the team, the architecture, or all three. My job is to figure out which one it actually is, fix the part that matters, and leave the rest alone. Seed to Series B.

Typical engagements
  • An MVP that has to ship before the next round.
  • A platform folding under its own traffic.
  • A team that's doubled and lost its shape.
  • AI that was supposed to be in the product but isn't.
1-on-1 callswhen a decision needs unblocking
Fractional CTOwhen the work spans months
Async architecture reviewa second pair of eyes on a design

Whichever gets you unstuck fastest.

Not the right fit if:

  • You want a code reviewer or someone to write PRs for you.
  • You're buying a CTO title rather than the work.
  • You want career or fundraising mentorship rather than engineering work.

For mentorship specifically, I'm listed on XMENTOR.PRO — an EBRD-backed platform for founders and tech leaders.

How I help founders

MVP in weeks

Founder shows up with a nine-month spec. We ship in six to eight weeks with maybe thirty percent of it. The other seventy turns out to be wrong once real users touch the thing. Strip to what you can defend, ship, learn, add.

MVPs die from gold-plating, not from missing features.

Scale without rewrites

Codebase was fine at one scale. At ten times the load it isn't, and someone's written a deck arguing for a rewrite. Almost always the wrong move — three or four specific bottlenecks are doing ninety percent of the damage, and a rewrite adds new ones on top.

Fix the bottlenecks, skip the rewrite, keep shipping.

Team that executes

Five engineers become fifty. Nobody knows who owns what, on-call is a lottery, releases break each other. Once the basics hold, AI tooling makes the team several times faster without adding headcount.

The fix is boring: clear ownership, a release train people actually trust, a QA baseline, calm on-call.

AI that drives results

Most AI initiatives fail because they solve the wrong problem — a demo nobody asked for, or an internal tool nobody adopts. The work is picking the one or two places where AI actually compounds: code generation, QA, support triage, a product feature users would pay for.

Ship what compounds. Measure.

Work & proof

Zendrop — Chief Technology Officer (current)

Dropshipping fulfillment platform. Leading platform scale-up and AI adoption.

99.9%uptime
~2Mmerchant orders per month
300K+connected stores
<200msat 1000+ concurrent
65–95%AI-generated code
3–4×faster time to market · cost −30%
Platform

AWS migration, CI/CD, monitoring, test coverage 70%+.

AI adoption

Developers no longer write code — they supervise, orchestrate, and review while AI handles generation. 65–95% AI-generated code across the team. Company-wide AI usage policy across CX, Dev, and Data teams.

AI products
  • Addrop — AI creative studio (video + image ads for merchants). Concept-to-live in a quarter, credit-based billing, paying customers from week one; now spun out as Zendrop's first standalone product.
  • Zendrop MCP — first dropshipping platform with MCP integration (ChatGPT, Claude, OpenClaw). Listed in OpenAI's ChatGPT app catalog, serving up to 100K requests a day.
  • In-app AI agent — resolves order issues and answers from the knowledge base; rolling out to merchants on an in-house agent platform built to carry every next AI product.
  • StoreBuild.ai — AI store builder in the Zendrop family; led the initial platform build, now run by its own team.
  • AI-powered QA pipeline — Claude Code + Playwright MCP: reads Jira tickets, analyzes PRs, generates test plans, runs E2E on staging, validates via DB, posts results back to Jira. Plus AI in the code-review pipeline.
Platform & partnerships
  • Merchant Open API — rebuilt internal architecture to open Zendrop to non-Shopify platforms; first external platform partner live in production, processing real orders.
  • Wix — integrated in 2 weeks, live in 4; now a full sales channel with a 4.9-rated app and 700+ reviews on the Wix App Market.
  • New sales channels beyond Shopify, TikTok Shop, and ClickFunnels.

Earlier

  • ETP GPB "Reserve" — Head of Development (2021–2022). Procurement planning inside GPB's trading platform (manufacturing, aviation, energy). Led architecture and delivery with a lean, partly outsourced team. MVP in weeks, dev speed +70%, cost −30%, stable in production.
  • Enplex Games — Head of Platform (2018–2019). Online PC game publishing platform. Built the web development department from scratch and led the platform's build across in-house and outsourced teams.
  • Gratzbonus — Founder (2017–2018). Fintech loyalty bridging payments and player engagement in gaming. Built the end-to-end MVP, payment integrations, deployment pipeline, QA baseline, initial hiring playbook. Acquired by a major Russian internet group in 2018.
  • Tinkoff Bank — Lead Software Architect (2014–2015). Pay-by-credit service for third-party e-commerce. Designed the application architecture and led the re-engineering of the payment flow.
  • Talaka.by — Advisor / Fractional CTO (2013–2015). Community and crowdfunding platform. Tightened delivery, set a monitoring baseline, guided smart use of outsourced teams. Faster iteration, cleaner path from MVP to stable releases.

Community & media

Thinking

Short takes from real work. No theory, no marketing — just what happened and what I learned.

AI

AI agents hit a ceiling — and that's the most important thing to know

Knowing where the ceiling is matters more than celebrating speed.
AI · Engineering

65% to 95% AI-generated code — what the spread actually means

The spread is the signal. Pay attention to it.
Engineering · Scale

Wix integration in 4 weeks — the real conversation

Ask them how the first month in production went.
Observability · Cost

Datadog bill cut in half — without losing visibility

Cut the noise, keep the signal, the bill follows.
AI · QA

AI QA that reads the ticket — not just the code

The unit of QA isn't the test case anymore. It's the ticket.
AI · Architecture

Three AI products, one platform — the second one is the point

Judge the first AI product by the price of the second.
Leadership · Process

A strike team beats a roadmap — when the gap is big enough

Roadmap for the compounding work, strike team for the bleeding.
AI · Risk

Open-weight insurance — why we run Qwen next to the frontier models

"We could switch" is a feeling. A tested fallback map is a plan.
Product · AI

Addrop shipped in a quarter — by stealing from ourselves

The fastest zero-to-one is the one where zero includes auth and billing.

Let's talk

Building something ambitious? Tell me what's breaking and where you're stuck — that's enough for me to know if I can help. LinkedIn is the best way to reach me.

Connect on LinkedIn