Portrait of Nikolay Shurkalin

I came to architecture
through ownership.

I did not become an architect by moving away from implementation. I started by hands-on product work across backend, frontend, realtime flows, and deployment — then broader ownership of APIs, integrations, infrastructure, and production reliability as scale demanded it.

Good architecture should help your team ship and operate — not just look clear in a deck.

I live in Warsaw. Outside work I’m a dad, a swimmer, a motorcycle rider, and someone who keeps taking connected things apart to understand how they behave.

Experience
13+ years building and operating software
Built & led
An early engineering team of five
Production scope
20+ APIs maintained and extended
Based
Warsaw, Poland

How I work

Four principles I keep returning to.

Useful architecture means clearer decisions, fewer production surprises, and a team that can carry the work forward.

  1. Start from what production shows you. Diagrams only help when they explain real code, failures, and who owns what in the live system.
  2. Name what you know vs. what you’re assuming before committing to a plan.
  3. Rewrite is a last resort. Stop the bleeding, preserve delivery, migrate deliberately.
  4. Build team capacity, not dependency. Useful work ends with clearer systems and decisions your people can own.

Experience

Experience with real scope.

What I’ve owned and shipped. Confidential client work stays off the page.

Product foundations and the first engineering team

Responsibility. Backend, frontend, realtime workflows, deployment, and product foundations. Built and led an early engineering team of five.

APIs, integrations, and high-load backend systems

Evidence. Maintained and extended 20+ production APIs and delivered 10+ new APIs in one global product environment.

From architecture decisions to runtime behavior

Scope. Architecture, backend, cloud, CI/CD, reliability, AI-assisted workflows, and connected-product boundaries.

Full experience on LinkedIn

Current focus

Where I’m investing now

Areas I’m actively working in — not a requirement for every project.

  • Production AI & real-time voice — Voice and agent products — testing quality, monitoring failures, knowing when a human should take over, and keeping scope under control.
  • Connected products & IoT — From what the device reports to what your backend and product do with it.
  • AI-assisted engineering — AI-assisted development: structured prompts, review, and controls so the team stays in charge of what merges.