Anton Kalashnikau · Engineering Manager
Anton Kalashnikau. I lead engineering teams that ship more by building less.
Hi, I’m Anton. For 12+ years I’ve been building SaaS products, from full-stack engineer to engineering manager. Today I run a team of 7–10 engineers at a Kubernetes cost-optimization platform. Most of my job is deciding what we won’t build.
Wrocław, Poland
- Years in SaaS
- 12+
- Years leading teams
- 5+
- Engineers on the team
- 7–10
01 — How I lead
Notes on leading
Mostly by subtraction. Three things I hold to.
- 01
Most things don’t need to be done at all.
The highest-leverage move in engineering is usually removing something: a service, a meeting, a feature nobody asked for. Before I add, I ask what we could stop doing. Half the roadmap usually survives that question, and the half that does moves faster.
- 02
People over technology.
Stacks change every few years. How a team talks, decides and disagrees is what compounds. I spend my time on hiring, clarity and honest feedback, and let the engineers own the technical calls.
- 03
Trust over control.
I set context and outcomes, not tickets and checkpoints. If I find myself needing to control the work, I either hired wrong or explained badly. Both are mine to fix, not the team’s.
02 — Experiments
Side projects
Small bets, each built to answer one question. The day job is the point; these keep my hands on the keyboard.
AvocadoScore
Live, free to run
A website audit that scores a site for Google and for AI crawlers in one report, with the fix list first.
dachzgory.pl
Pilot with roofing firms
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Offramp
Live
A cloud exit calculator: one month of an AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Oracle bill, priced on Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway or DigitalOcean, net of the engineers it takes to run it.
Let’s talk.
Twenty minutes on what your engineering team could stop doing. Or just say hi.