How Engineers Learn to Negotiate — Sergey Kiselev

Sergey Kiselev begins with a student company in Irkutsk, where building business software gradually led him into management. Conferences revealed new opportunities, and moving to St Petersburg prompted a return to an engineering role. At Yandex he worked on search quality evaluation, then internal infrastructure and Yandex Cloud services. His experience organizing work continued to shape his contribution even without a formal management title.

Sergey joined MWS Cloud Platform to build Development Platform. He spent the first six months assembling the core team, then helped other teams establish their hiring processes. He designed interview tasks, conducted the first interviews, trained interviewers, and built an internal community. The platform also grew through collaboration: engineers joined product teams to help write services while developing shared tools. This produced four areas of work: Go, Kotlin, deployment, and a unified API.

Agreeing on shared practices proved as important as building technical components. Product team leads discuss their needs with the platform team, which connects them with other infrastructure teams. During an incident, someone needs to coordinate the response and ensure users receive clear updates. Once services recover, the review must lead to concrete changes: a promise to be more careful or an unfinished task does not address the cause of a failure.

Discussing AI, Sergey describes giving agents access to documentation through MCP and expressing team agreements as instructions. He links product value to people working together to solve a problem and separately emphasizes restrictions on sharing user data. He proposes using metrics to model team interactions as a possible direction for management. A recurring principle is to build tools and teams that keep contributing without their creator’s constant involvement.