Andrei Lazarev
Engineering Manager at Innotech
Andrei Lazarev is an Engineering Manager and AI Researcher with over 6 years of management experience specializing in building mission-critical systems and cultivating high-performing teams in high-stakes fintech environments. Based in Dubai, UAE, his approach is grounded in data-driven process optimization and a deep commitment to mentoring the next generation of leaders, with a passion for solving complex technical challenges that have a direct and measurable impact on business outcomes.
At Innotech (March 2022 - Present), working on the VTB Bank Project, Andrei serves as Engineering Manager leading development for a large-scale migration of a legacy core banking system for retail deposit operations. He manages a team of up to 12 professionals including engineers, analysts, and QA specialists responsible for migrating core banking functionality.
He successfully assumed leadership of a 36-person organization spanning 4 teams during a critical phase, preventing project delays and ensuring 100% on-time delivery for this strategic initiative. He spearheaded talent acquisition for the entire stream by conducting over 400 technical interviews, playing a key role in building and scaling multiple high-performing engineering teams from the ground up. He identified, hired, and personally mentored two new Team Leads, enabling them to successfully manage their teams and deliver complex integrations. Previously at Innotech (March 2022 - September 2023), he led the creation of a mission-critical, real-time anti-fraud platform to replace a costly and inflexible third-party vendor solution, architecting a high-throughput platform using Java, Apache Flink, Tarantool, and Kafka that achieved processing latency under 50 milliseconds. He built a highly effective full-cycle team from scratch, fostering a collaborative environment that resulted in zero employee turnover throughout the project's duration.
At Innotech (March 2022 - Present), working on the VTB Bank Project, Andrei serves as Engineering Manager leading development for a large-scale migration of a legacy core banking system for retail deposit operations. He manages a team of up to 12 professionals including engineers, analysts, and QA specialists responsible for migrating core banking functionality.
He successfully assumed leadership of a 36-person organization spanning 4 teams during a critical phase, preventing project delays and ensuring 100% on-time delivery for this strategic initiative. He spearheaded talent acquisition for the entire stream by conducting over 400 technical interviews, playing a key role in building and scaling multiple high-performing engineering teams from the ground up. He identified, hired, and personally mentored two new Team Leads, enabling them to successfully manage their teams and deliver complex integrations. Previously at Innotech (March 2022 - September 2023), he led the creation of a mission-critical, real-time anti-fraud platform to replace a costly and inflexible third-party vendor solution, architecting a high-throughput platform using Java, Apache Flink, Tarantool, and Kafka that achieved processing latency under 50 milliseconds. He built a highly effective full-cycle team from scratch, fostering a collaborative environment that resulted in zero employee turnover throughout the project's duration.
At T-bank (formerly Tinkoff Bank) (August 2017 - February 2022), progressing from Software Engineer to Engineering Manager, he managed a cross-functional team of up to 12 engineers responsible for developing and maintaining core microservices for Small and Medium Enterprise banking, including Scoring, CRM Enrichment, and Document Collection. He reduced average feature time-to-market by 66%, from 12 to 4 days, by implementing Agile/Kanban methodologies, redesigning Jira workflows, and establishing a culture of quarterly demos. He drove adoption of automated testing for a key scoring service, increasing test coverage from 0% to 93%, and championed SRE principles including business monitoring dashboards with Grafana and Splunk. He architected and delivered a self-service Admin Console enabling business users to configure scoring rules directly, reducing development team dependency to zero for this task. As Senior Software Engineer, he spearheaded development of an automated document collection service that eliminated manual document follow-ups and led major refactoring of the CRM Enrichment service resulting in 87% reduction in manual data entry.
Andrei is an active AI researcher with five peer-reviewed publications in IEEE conferences, including research on spatial priming for LLM accuracy on chart data extraction, prompt chaining for automated scholarly report generation, and utilizing large language models for financial trend analysis and digest creation. He serves as Expert Judge for multiple hackathons including the VTB API Hackathon (2024 and 2025), All-Russian Biometrics Hackathon by SBER, Lifestyle Evolution Hackathon by IAHD, IT Inno Hack, and NaimixCode.
Andrei holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. His technical expertise spans Java/Kotlin, Spring Boot, microservices, event-driven architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Tarantool, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and AI technologies including LLM integration, prompt engineering, and RAG.
Andrei is an active AI researcher with five peer-reviewed publications in IEEE conferences, including research on spatial priming for LLM accuracy on chart data extraction, prompt chaining for automated scholarly report generation, and utilizing large language models for financial trend analysis and digest creation. He serves as Expert Judge for multiple hackathons including the VTB API Hackathon (2024 and 2025), All-Russian Biometrics Hackathon by SBER, Lifestyle Evolution Hackathon by IAHD, IT Inno Hack, and NaimixCode.
Andrei holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. His technical expertise spans Java/Kotlin, Spring Boot, microservices, event-driven architecture, Domain-Driven Design, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Tarantool, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and AI technologies including LLM integration, prompt engineering, and RAG.