Mikita Hrybaleu

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

Connect

Driving growth through technology

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 serving 100K+ merchants.

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. I've done this across fintech, crowdfunding, procurement, and dropshipping — the domains change, the pattern doesn't.

Outside of Zendrop I mentor founders, judge the occasional hackathon, and write short pieces about what I learn from shipping — no theory, no marketing.

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.

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. Seed to Series B.

Three modes: 1-on-1 calls when a decision needs unblocking, fractional CTO when the work spans months, async architecture review when you want a 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. Find those, fix those, keep shipping.

Team that executes

Five engineers become fifty. Nobody knows who owns what, on-call is a lottery, releases break each other. The fix is boring: clear ownership, a release train people actually trust, a QA baseline, calm on-call. Then layer AI tooling so the team moves several times faster without adding headcount.

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 those. Measure.

Work & proof

Zendrop — Chief Technology Officer (current)

Dropshipping platform serving 100K+ entrepreneurs. Leading platform scale-up and AI adoption.

99.9% uptime
~400K orders / mo
200K+ connected stores
<200ms @ 1000+ concurrent
65–95% AI-generated code
TTM 3–4× faster · Cost −30%
Platform

AWS migration, CI/CD, monitoring, test coverage 65%+, team scaled 5→50.

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

StoreBuild.ai. Zendrop MCP — first dropshipping platform with MCP integration (ChatGPT, Claude, OpenClaw). First high-volume merchant connected within a day of the public release. AI Creative Studio — AI video ad generation for merchants, shipped concept-to-live in Q1 with credit-based billing and paying customers from week one. 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). AI in code review pipeline.

Platform & partnerships

Merchant Open API — rebuilt internal architecture to open Zendrop to non-Shopify platforms. First external platform partner integrated and live in production, processing real orders. Wix integration — integrated in 2 weeks, live in 4 total, zero incidents since launch. 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.

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.

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