Stepan Arakelian

For more than 14 years I have been building and scaling high-load real-time systems in fintech, payments, iGaming and IoT. Today I am the CTO of a regulated iGaming business, responsible for technology strategy, architecture and making sure the engineering team delivers results consistently. Under my leadership runs a platform that serves tens of thousands of players at the same time and processes a heavy flow of financial transactions: multi-currency wallets, betting and bonus engines, ML models for fraud detection, risk scoring and personalization. All of it is built with AML/KYC and data-protection requirements in mind.

Before that I was CTO at INUI Gaming in Dubai, where I built the engineering team from scratch to 20 people, chose the stack, designed the architecture and launched R&D on AI-based anti-cheat and recommendation systems. Earlier I led the IoT business at MTS as Cluster CTO: around 120 engineers, platform architecture and engineering standards at the scale of a telecom operator. I started out as a developer, writing algorithmic trading systems for exchanges, industrial software for controlling a hydroelectric power plant, and enterprise systems at Sber.

My greatest strengths are distributed and event-driven systems, cloud-native architecture, and platforms where compliance is part of the product rather than a formality. At the same time, I am just as interested in the operational side of the work: how to build a team, grow it from 20 to 100+ people, find and develop leaders, and make technology genuinely help the business instead of living a life of its own.