Fractional CTO · Barcelona, Spain
I was a CTO and an owner, so I look at technology from the business side.
I’m Artem Kiselev. I work with business owners who started building with AI and got burned. You end up with a system you trust and can keep developing yourself.
Not a pitch. No obligation.
Prefer email? me@artkiselev.dev. I reply within a day.
How I got here
Timepad2008 to 2019
I founded Timepad and ran product and technology: everything except sales. It grew to 200,000 clients and 4,000,000 events and became one of the largest event management and ticketing platforms in Eastern Europe. I led the product, development and SRE teams until the company was sold in 2019.
I know what a business expects from its technology.
Both sides of the table2019 to now
I’ve run my own business, worked as an employee, and now work as a consultant for clients such as Zetique and Nezabudka. As an employee I headed the Tooling department at P2P.org: in a year and a half my team launched about twenty internal and external systems. I’ve coordinated teams of up to twenty people, flat and hierarchical, and worked out a way to lower the bus factor without burying a team in process. I know what a decision really costs: what happens when a vendor leaves, what it takes to maintain a homegrown system, and the full price in money and time once adoption and support are counted.
AIsince 2025
I led AI engineering teams through 2023 and applied what I knew to my own AI projects. They went smoothly. Then I started talking to other owners and heard the opposite: AI-built projects that turned into pain and got abandoned. I dug into why. The result is a system that puts the development of a person without a technical background on reliable engineering rails.
How I work
- I look for the real need.
- Clients usually ask for a specific fix. I look for the need underneath it and solve that. If a spreadsheet or a no-code tool meets the need, I say so before writing any code.
- Nothing locks you in.
- Portable infrastructure, open formats and tools. Your code, repo and keys stay with you. You can part ways with me or with any vendor, and the system keeps running.
- Every check that can run itself, does.
- Tests, linters and cross-checks that catch drift from decisions already made. People spend their attention on judgment.
- AI agents are treated like teammates.
- Written rules, clear context and a setup that is easy to work in: the same things a new engineer needs. The agent makes fewer mistakes.
What I do now
Every day I write code, make product decisions, and build applications and AI pipelines, for my own projects and for clients.
I work hands-on in Python (Django), PHP (Laravel) and TypeScript (Vue, Angular), on PostgreSQL, Redis and Docker, and in no-code tools such as Airtable. Whatever your system is built with, I can read it.
Who I’m not for
If you have only an idea and expect me to build it from scratch, I’m not the right person. If the deadline was yesterday and speed matters more than stability, same. I’ll tell you on the first call.
Outside work
I live in Barcelona with my two kids. I like making things with my hands, and exploring Catalonia by car and motorcycle.
Let’s look at your system.
Prefer email? me@artkiselev.dev. I reply within a day.
I take no more than three clients at a time and work on every project myself.
- NDA before any access.
- Legally binding contract.
- Read-only access.