Dmytro Basan — Engineering Manager & Founder of DrillUp

Dmytro BasanEngineering Manager at Klarna, Berlin. Founder of DrillUp.I lead cross-functional engineering teams at Klarna and built DrillUp, the deliberate practice platform where engineers, tech leads, and managers rehearse high-stakes career conversations — 1:1s, promotion cases, pushback on unrealistic deadlines, and architectural disagreements — before stepping into the room.Impact

$5M+ annual cost efficiencies from an enterprise AI migration and model optimisation.

99% latency reduction: card transaction visibility from 5 minutes to 3 seconds across global payment APIs.

15+ engineers scaled and mentored across cross-domain teams, through zero-downtime upgrades and security compliance.

Core competenciesEngineering leadership: people management and mentorship, stakeholder alignment, org scaling, distributed teams, engineering effectiveness, risk mitigation.Architecture and platform: distributed systems design, event-driven architecture, real-time data pipelines, performance and latency engineering, zero-downtime migrations, observability, platform engineering.AI and applied ML: LLM system architecture, RAG and vector search, agentic workflows, evaluation, guardrails, inference cost and token economics.Domains: fintech and global payments, Web3 and digital identity, real-time analytics, cloud infrastructure, data architecture.Stack: AWS, Kafka, Node.js, TypeScript, React, Java and Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, GraphQL.Elsewhere

DrillUp

me@dmytrobasan.com

Featured across industry podcasts and panels on empathetic management, high-performing culture, growth mindset, and scaling engineering teams.