I get people in a room and make sure they're glad they came.

I'm from the Ulytau region of Kazakhstan, the great steppe. There is a nomad spirit in me that keeps me moving and learning; even within Kazakhstan I lived in 3 cities.

I studied Engineering Physics at Satbayev University in Almaty, with an exchange semester at Lublin University of Technology in Poland. Physics trained me to break a messy system into parts I can measure. I still work that way, only now the systems are teams and projects.

My first job was at Government for Citizens, the state corporation that runs Kazakhstan's e-government and public services, with more than 20,000 employees. I worked as a business analyst on the system citizens use to pay for national health insurance.

I wrote non-functional requirements, tested new features, and checked that every change met national regulations and SWIFT messaging standards. I worked with the National Bank, the Ministry of Health, the National Health Insurance Fund and the commercial banks.

The part I’m proudest of came from an idea. I proposed a partnership with the fintech company Kaspi.kz and then coordinated the integration. It launched the first channel where citizens could make these payments free of charge, right in their banking app. Later, all 22 commercial banks in Kazakhstan adopted the same model. We also created a single payment that citizens make once, and the system splits it into their three contributions: social, health and pension.

In 2021 I moved to Milan for an MSc in Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, on an international student scholarship. I learned Italian along the way, after Kazakh, Russian and English.

For my thesis at the university's Digital Innovation Observatory, I mapped 96 digital wallet and payment solutions across 46 countries on 23 variables. The findings were used in the Observatory's publications. In 2024 my travel app idea was one of 40 Central Asian startups selected for the USAID / RS incubation bootcamp. I ran the user interviews and market research, and built the MVP myself with no-code tools (Adalo and Airtable).

Thesis · Analysis of the global digital wallets landscape →

Alongside my studies I co-founded Örnek Astana, my family's business renting Kazakh traditional clothing. I led strategy, marketing and social media. In three years we grew the brand organically to 4,000 followers and 60,000 monthly views, with more than 20 collaborations with photographers, local businesses, Astana IT University and national TV shows.

At Whirlpool Corporation EMEA's headquarters I joined as a junior project manager. I ran stand-ups, 7 sprint plannings and reviews, and retrospectives for a 7-person SEO team, and worked with Product Owners on the Jira backlog for brand sites like Whirlpool, Hotpoint, Indesit and Bauknecht.

I also ran integration and user acceptance testing for 2 CRM projects rolling out across 29 EU markets. Both went live on schedule within 4 months, including the product registration pages customers use to activate their warranty.

Eidosmedia builds content software for investment banks, asset managers and media companies. Since January 2025 I've been the project manager working directly with the CTO, across a 65-person engineering department in 9 teams: enterprise applications, QA, AI, design, backend integration and platform engineering.

Right now I'm project manager for AI Content OS, our platform that takes agentic AI out of the pilot stage and into production, so a team can simply talk to its content.

Most of my week goes into keeping the work visible. I run the bi-weekly reviews where 25 to 30 executives and managers from Technology, Product, Operations and Sales look at the same picture. Those reviews replaced more than 10 separate status meetings. The picture comes from a 21-page Power BI dashboard I built to replace manual Excel reporting. I also manage the €300K engineering budget, and we stay within 5% of plan.

I co-lead the engineering AI adoption program. Today all 65 engineers use Claude and GitHub Copilot, and I coordinated our onboarding into Anthropic's Claude Partner Network. I've also organized 12 internal events, from all-hands to workshops, drawing up to 150 of our 220 employees.

I'm looking for my next role in project or operations management, and I'm open to relocating within Europe.

For teams in the Netherlands: I'm eligible for the Dutch orientation year permit (zoekjaar hoogopgeleiden), which lets me live and work there without employer sponsorship.