CTO, Engineering and fractional work

I scrape the web at scale, build software products and cut cloud bills.

I'm a lead engineer and former CTO. I've built and run production systems for 10+ years: two startups as founding engineer, an award-winning UK insurer as CTO, and a data platform that reads 30,000+ online shops.

Work with me See what I build
Andrii Votiakov

Andrii Votiakov
Łódź, Poland · remote, Central European Time

The work in numbers

10+ years: two startups from the first commit, an insurer where I ran engineering, and the systems and products I own.

2×founding engineer: a UK insurer and an IoT hardware companyLocket · Hero Labs
£2m+raised by those two startups on platforms I builtLocket · Hero Labs
WinnerHome Insurance, National Insurance Awards 2023, while I was CTOLocket
~15engineers, data scientists and designers in the team I ledLocket
30,000+online shops read every day by a data platform I ownedBasket
30–90%off cloud and data bills for the companies I work withreducecost.cloud

Things I build and run

My own products, and the companies I build with as a co-founder or fractional CTO.

cartpie.com
Cartpie homepage: any product URL in, clean structured data out

Cartpie

Founder

An API and MCP server for product data. Send any product URL and get the price, availability, variants and GTIN back as JSON. Four extraction methods run in parallel and the most confident result wins.

cartpie.com ↗
fabla.si
Fabla homepage: no more inventing posts from scratch

Fabla

Co-founder

AI content planning for small brands, in Polish and English. It learns the business and the audience, writes posts in the brand's voice and schedules them. My favourite design call: the anti-AI "humanizer" is a separate rewrite pass over the finished draft, so we can test it and swap its model.

fabla.si ↗
mieszkanko.app
mieszkanko homepage: apartment hunting without chaos

mieszkanko

Fractional CTO

Apartment hunting in Poland without the chaos. Listings from Otodom and Gratka on one board, AI summaries, price tracking and a map of real transaction prices from the official GUGiK registry.

mieszkanko.app ↗
reducecost.cloud
reducecost.cloud homepage: cloud cost optimisation, cut 30 to 90 percent

reducecost.cloud

Founder

Cloud cost work paid from verified savings. A read-only audit first, then the fixes. Results so far: AWS 78% lower in 4 weeks, BigQuery 72% lower in 3 weeks, Datadog 90% lower in 2 weeks.

reducecost.cloud ↗

Apify StoreScrapers I publish and maintain: SHEIN products, job data from ATS systems, app reviews and Google Trends.apify.com ↗

Companies I built with

Two startups from the first commit, and the data platform of a shopping app. What I did and what changed.

Locket · 2020–2024 · Founding engineer, then CTO

From the first line of code to CTO of an award-winning insurer

Locket is a UK home insurer regulated by the FCA. I joined as the first engineer and built the product that customers bought: a policy in about 2 minutes, with a price in 1 to 2 seconds.

As CTO I led the move to B2B. We built a multi-tenant platform for other insurers, with APIs and a mobile SDK, that a customer could install into its own cloud account in one step. Large insurers' security teams reviewed it. I led a team of about 15 and presented the technology to investors.

  • ~2 minto buy a policy
  • £1m+raised on Seedrs
  • ~15people in the team

Time to buy home insurance

Locket~2 min
Other insurers15+ min
Winner, Home InsuranceNational Insurance Awards 2023

Hero Labs (now Watergate) · 2018–2020, 2023–2024 · Founding engineer, later interim CTO

The platform behind a smart water valve

Hero Labs makes Sonic, a smart water valve for homes. I designed and built the platform from the start: the device cloud, the backend and the mobile app. The company raised £1 million in 3 months with the first version.

I also built the data platform that let the data scientists teach a model to recognise appliances and find leaks, with users labelling their own water events in the app. Years later the company asked me back as interim CTO to modernise the platform and prepare it for due diligence.

  • £1mraised in 3 months
  • 1 stelemetry from every device

Raised with the first version I built

£1m in 3 months

Basket (wntd.ai) · 2024–2026 · Lead engineer, technical owner

A data platform that reads 30,000+ online shops

Basket is a shopping app: users save products from any online shop and the app tracks the price. I owned the data platform behind it for two years and led a team of five.

Then I designed a new version and moved production to it. AI agents wrote the code to my design and under my review, in about two weeks. Both versions ran side by side on the same work before the switch.

  • ~£14ka month cut from cloud and data bills

Before and after the new version

Success rate85% → 95%+
Time per page25 s → 3 s
Cost of data collection80%+ lower

before after

How I work

Habits from 10+ years of building and running production systems.

  1. Measure before you spend.

    The obvious cause of a problem is often the wrong one. Before I put money or engineering time into a fix, I measure where the failures and the costs really are.

  2. Success is the result, not the status code.

    A green dashboard proves little. I define success by the outcome the user needs: the data arrived, the policy was issued, the bill went down.

  3. Cheapest method first.

    Expensive tools are the last step, not the default. Most work does not need them, and the savings add up every month.

  4. A backup is done when the restore works.

    I test restores, write runbooks and run incident drills before anything breaks.

  5. Delete before you add.

    Unused resources and dead code cost money and attention every month. Removing them is often the cheapest improvement there is.

  6. Agents write the code. I own the design and the review.

    I set teams up to work agent-first: repository instructions, shared skills and a model for each task. A person still owns every design decision and every review.

Now

Updated October 2026 · Łódź, Poland

  • Building Cartpie, a product data API and MCP server.
  • Co-founding Fabla, AI content planning for small brands, in closed beta.
  • Fractional CTO for small companies in e-commerce, property and logistics, mieszkanko among them.
  • Cutting cloud bills through reducecost.cloud, paid from the savings.
  • Looking for my next full-time leadership role: CTO, Head of Engineering or Principal, remote from Poland.

Writing

Short technical posts on LinkedIn

Two ways to work with me.

Full-time

CTO, Head of Engineering, Principal or founding engineer

Remote from Łódź, Poland. B2B contract or employment. I lead the team and I still write code.

Fractional and projects

Fractional CTO, platform, scraping or cloud cost work

Through my company, rēte consulting. Cost work can be paid from verified savings.

Hidden from bots. One click shows it.
LinkedIn ↗ GitHub ↗ Apify ↗

Background

The short version. The rest is on LinkedIn.

  • 2024–nowrēte consulting · fractional CTOMy consulting business in Poland, and my own products.
  • 2024–2026Basket (wntd.ai) · lead engineerData platform for 30,000+ shops, and AI features. Team of 5.
  • 2021–2024Locket · CTOMulti-tenant insurance platform for other insurers. Team of about 15.
  • 2020–2021Locket · founding engineerThe B2C insurance product, from the first commit.
  • 2018–2020, 2023–2024Hero Labs · founding engineer, interim CTOIoT platform, mobile app and data platform.
  • 2012–2018Neos, EngineArch, freelanceAn insurance IoT platform, work for UEFA and PKO BP, websites and online shops.
  • From age 12Competitive programmingNational and international olympiads in Pascal and C/C++.
B.A.Sc. Computer Science, Lodz University of Technology. English and Polish at work, Ukrainian and Russian native. LinkedIn profile