Yuri Niyazov

Hi everyone. My name is Yuri, and I am currently the Vice President of Engineering at Academia.edu. I've been with the company for almost 10 years now. I joined as a regular Software Engineer back in 2013, and have since then done almost every job there is to do in Engineering: I was a Full-Stack Product engineer, an SRE, the SRE team lead, the Director of Infrastructure and a Senior Director of Engineering. My previous boss, the founding CTO of Academia.edu, retired in 2021, and I was promoted to VP.

I have been mentoring for over a decade at this point, both within my organization and externally. About 18 months ago I decided to formalize my external mentoring activities, develop a web presence and start charging modest fees.

At this point I have had a 25-year career. Here’s a sample of the very wide variety things that I’ve done before ending up at my current employer and becoming successful:

- I was an independent software vendor during the late 1990s
- I worked at a big financial firm (Goldman Sachs) during the early-mid 2000’s.
- I co-founded a startup and we were accepted into YCombinator in 2008. We didn’t attend and instead disbanded.
- I was fired from a fairly well-known tech company in 2009.
- I ran a small software consultancy between 2009 and 2015.

I've seen enough to be a good mentor, and I have a lot of experiences to share.

Here's a testimonial from one of my previous mentees from another platform:
"I've had the privilege of being mentored by Yuri over the past year as I've gone through a career transition from a technical lead role to an engineering director in a startup. I have been able to go to Yuri for advice on many broad topics such as roadmap planning, team management, communication, hiring and more. Yuri is able to curate his guidance in a way that is actionable, within the context and resources I have, which has directly and positively impacted my growth into my new role. I look forward to our continued conversations!


- Stephen Dresselhaus-Marais"

What you can expect from me during our mentoring relationship:

- actionable advice

- reading recommendations

- data-driven approaches

- homework

What I don't do: endless navel-gazing.

On the personal side of things: I am originally from the ex-Soviet Union, from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. I came to the United States in 1993, when I was 12, with my folks. We moved to New York City, which is where I went to high school (Stuyvesant), college (NYU), and had my first few jobs. I moved to the SF Bay Area in 2010. I lived in Berkeley for a long time, and in 2021 I bought a house in Concord, CA, where I live with my wife and two kids, ages 7 and 5.