Top Tech Officers Balance Code and Finance

There is a particular failure mode common to technically excellent CTOs, where they optimize for engineering elegance, but the business around them makes decisions they don’t understand and couldn’t influence. Oleksandr Orlov, co-founder and CTO of Andersen, built a 3,500-person global software company by refusing to accept that division of labor.

“Education doesn’t save projects,” he says. “Methodology does. But methodology without diverse knowledge is just a template.” Oleksandr holds two degrees — systems engineering and enterprise economics — from Cherkasy State Technological University.

The majority of engineering organizations treat team structure as an org-chart exercise, but Oleksandr treats it as an engineering problem with the same rigor he’d apply to a distributed system: failure modes, redundancy, latency, throughput. When Andersen was growing fast and Orlov found himself with 20 engineers reporting directly to him, the system broke.

His solution was structural, designing a management architecture with layered accountability: project managers, delivery managers, their supervisors, each tier with defined decision authority and handoff protocols. He built the incentive layer in parallel — goal frameworks tied to measurable outcomes, individual development matrices for every engineering track, resource management systems calibrated to absorb the pressure of dozens of simultaneous client engagements.

“Any organization is people,” Oleksandr says. “Where there are people, there will be human factors. What you can do is build systems that reduce the damage and raise the floor.” The difference between that system and a conventional org chart is the same as the difference between a monolith and a microservice: when something breaks in one place, it doesn’t bring down everything else.

One of the most consequential decisions in software services is also the least discussed in engineering circles: how you price the work. Time-and-materials contracts put schedule and scope risk on the client, while fixed-price contracts transfer that risk to the vendor. Andersen’s CTO views it as an engineering one, and the PDS Competency Center — the internal framework Oleksandr founded at Andersen to govern fixed-price engagements — is, at its core, a risk pricing system.

The PDS framework was built by examining every fixed-price engagement that ran over budget, every scope dispute that became a commercial standoff, every estimate that collapsed under undocumented conditions. He kept finding the same gap: the organization had no formal mechanism for translating client expectations into engineering commitments at a level both parties could hold each other to.

Oleksandr Orlov’s economics background shows most clearly in how he decides which services Andersen offers. The decision is based on whether the market will pay for it at a margin that justifies the investment in people, infrastructure, and institutional knowledge. He calls these “liquid services” — a term borrowed from financial markets.

Liquid services have consistent demand, defensible pricing, and delivery that can be standardized across teams and geographies. In Andersen’s portfolio, they are the difference between sustainable growth and expensive capability that wins a few impressive contracts and never quite scales.

As Andersen continues to grow, it’s likely that Oleksandr’s unique approach to engineering and business will be tested in new and complex ways. With his background in systems engineering and enterprise economics, Oleksandr may be well-positioned to address these challenges, but it’s also possible that the company will need to adapt and evolve in order to continue scaling successfully.

“I want the customer to make money using our services,” Oleksandr says. “Even when you’re in a difficult stretch on a project — and there are those stretches — that goal doesn’t change.” It is, in practice, the filter behind every service Andersen has launched under his watch: not what the company can build, but what the market demands right now.

Andersen, 16 years after a handshake between two engineers in Cherkasy, now operates 20 international offices with a team of 3,500. The architecture of that growth was technical, organizational, and commercial at once — constructed by someone for whom those were never separate problems to begin with.

They have achieved significant growth.