Paris · Microsoft · ex-AWS
Technology strategy, and the engineering to deliver it.
Chief Solutions Architect in Cloud and AI at Microsoft, advising CTOs on cloud and AI strategy. Before that, twenty years inside the engineering organisation: teams of up to seventy, payment platforms under PCI DSS, and the delivery model that carried them.
I lead engineering where the technology decisions have money and risk attached. That has meant owning production for payment platforms under PCI DSS, running distributed teams of up to seventy, and rebuilding how a company ships software when the old model stopped working.
Today I do that from the outside, advising Microsoft's largest enterprise customers alongside their CTOs and CIOs. What I care about hasn't changed: the operating model an organisation is left running once the programme ends.
- Technology strategy and multi-year architecture direction
- Engineering organisation: structure, hiring, delivery model
- Production risk: resiliency, security, compliance, incident readiness
- Cost and unit economics, owned by the teams that generate them
Key numbers
Five things I can point at. Every one has a date and a team behind it on the CV.
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70
People in the distributed international team whose backlog and priorities I owned as Infrastructure Product Owner.
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12×
Release frequency on Ingenico's payment platforms, from twice a year to twice a month, after I rebuilt how the organisation shipped.
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millions
USD of customer cloud spend removed across enterprises and startups I advised at AWS.
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tens of thousands
AWS solution deployments of the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards, the cost tooling built by a team of eight that I led.
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20 years
Inside the engineering organisation, from firmware on payment terminals to running operations, before I started advising.
How I run engineering
Cost is an engineering property.
If the team creating the spend cannot see it, no dashboard will fix it. Accountability has to sit with the people who make the decisions.
Resiliency is tested or it is theoretical.
RPO and RTO mean nothing until you have failed over on purpose, in production, on a day you chose.
Delivery cadence is organisational, not technical.
We went from two releases a year to two a month by changing who decided what shipped, not by buying a better pipeline.
Compliance is cheaper designed in than audited in.
A decade of building payment systems taught me that the expensive version is always the one you retrofit.
Twenty-five years
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Mar 2026 — now
Chief Solutions Architect in Cloud and AI
Microsoft
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Jan 2025 — Mar 2026
Senior Cloud Optimization Solution Architect
Amazon Web Services
Optimization and enterprise architecture for Fortune 100 companies and high-growth startups.
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Feb 2021 — Jan 2025
Senior Technical Account Manager
Amazon Web Services
Led the team of 8 that built the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards. Principal advisor to AWS's largest French customer. TAM of the Year.
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Jan 2019 — Jan 2021
Infrastructure Product Owner
Ingenico
Backlog for a distributed team of 70. Self-service hybrid cloud for payment and web applications.
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Jan 2017 — Jan 2019
Head of Web Operations, Web and Big Data
Ingenico
PCI DSS web operations, team of 12 across 8 application teams.
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Dec 2015 — Jan 2017
DevOps Manager, Continuous Delivery Architect
Ingenico
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2010 — 2015
Integration engineer · QA engineer · Embedded developer
Ingenico
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2001 — 2009
Team lead and software developer
State Optical Institute, Russia
Hardware and software for optical interferometry control systems.
Certifications and recognition
Guest speaker at AWS Summit Paris, technical sessions at AWS re:Invent. Awarded TAM of the Year and Golden Member of the Technical Field Community for Cloud Operations.
MSc in Computational Optics, ITMO, St Petersburg. English and French.
Certifications
- AZ-305 Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- AZ-104 Azure Administrator
- AI-103 Azure AI Apps & Agents Developer
- GH-600 GitHub Agentic AI Developer
- GH-300 GitHub Copilot
- AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
- AWS Security – Specialty
- AWS SysOps Administrator – Associate
- FinOps Certified Practitioner
Get in touch
- iakov@iakovgan.com
- Phone
- +33 7 60 55 62 06
- in/iakovgan
- GitHub
- iakov-gan