Car Sharing: Getting Operations in Order

Artem Pulyavin is CTO of CityDrive: 20,000 cars, 100,000 daily rentals, and 150 technology staff. Telemetry, the app, and operations connect a physical fleet to a digital product, where downtime immediately affects people and cars.

Artem started at school in Tashkent, with digital goods, websites, and a team before university. Engineering was a way to launch products, not an end. After moving to Russia, he built a survey platform, then a corporate library and white-label products at Alpina Digital, comparing their economics.

At Foodmate, the team built a Delivery Club rival. When Mail.ru bought Delivery Club, it stopped the project and transferred the team into the acquired service. Artem then worked at Foodfox and Unitemp; at Citymobil he took over VK Taxi, built a web team, and grew it to a quarter of rides. Leading client engineering, he reorganized around domains until Citymobil closed in 2022.

At CityDrive he inherited unreliable infrastructure, manual releases, and a flat team. In three years it gained on-call rotations, incident severity levels, a new organization, and an app positioned as a platform for motorists. GPS jamming required location prediction; computer vision automated inspections, while language models assist support and engineers.