From Physics to Engineering: Curiosity Pays Off Later

Andrey Ivanov traces his path from a student fascinated by physics to an engineering director at inDrive, where he leads ride-hailing algorithms for pricing, driver-rider matching, and driver incentives. Before that, he spent six years building Chattermill, a British customer intelligence platform.

A former closed science town, a physics and mathematics school, and MIPT all pointed toward research. A team course project revealed another kind of work: software could be built, tested, and turned into a product quickly. Andrey kept his love of science but chose engineering as his profession.

Early startups taught Andrey to connect code, infrastructure, product, and business. He then worked on interactive video at Clickberry, a Node.js backend, and an internal car-rental venture at OneTwoTrip. At Tinkoff he built a CMS, split a monolith into services, adopted Kubernetes and Google Cloud, and managed several teams.

At Chattermill he rebuilt infrastructure and the team, adapted communication and hiring to an international environment, and evolved a B2B product built around customer-feedback analysis. Large language models lowered the technical barrier without erasing the value of a complete solution. His advice is to stay curious and keep accumulating skills across domains.