Whole products
Code, interfaces, realtime behavior, deployment, and the first production decisions.
About / Nikolay “Nik” Shurkalin
I came to architecture
through ownership.
I did not become an architect by moving away from implementation. I started by building whole product surfaces: backend, frontend, realtime workflows, deployment, and the foundations an early team needed to ship.
As the systems and teams grew, my responsibility moved outward: global APIs, integrations, cloud delivery, reliability, and the production behavior behind the product promise.
That path still shapes my work. I want architecture to make the system easier to understand, change, and operate, not merely easier to present.
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.
THE PATH
Responsibility expanded with the system.
From whole-product implementation to team leadership and production ownership, while staying close to code and runtime evidence.
Early teams
Built and led a team of five while keeping product and engineering decisions connected.
Global systems
Worked across 20+ production APIs, distributed integrations, delivery foundations, and shared ownership.
Runtime outcomes
Architecture, cloud, reliability, AI workflows, and what actually happens after release.
HOW I WORK
Four principles I keep returning to.
Architecture is useful when it improves decisions, production behavior, and the team’s ability to own what comes next.
Stay close to runtime evidence.
Diagrams matter only when they explain code, state, failure, ownership, and production behavior.
Make uncertainty visible.
Separate what is verified, reported, and inferred before turning confidence into a plan.
Avoid reflexive rewrites.
Contain the immediate risk, protect product flow, then migrate through explicit boundaries.
Leave ownership behind.
The useful result is a system and decision process the team can carry without me.
CURRENT FOCUS
The work I keep pulling closer.
Current direction, not a claim that every engagement needs AI or connected-device work.
Production AI & real-time voice
Agent and voice workflows, evaluation, observability, human handoffs, and operational boundaries.
Connected products & IoT
The path from device behavior and telemetry to backend decisions and product experience.
AI-assisted engineering
Codex, Claude Code, reusable skills, and review systems that make delegated work controllable.