The Architect — Builder of the Engine

Twice I left a country before the reason to leave became obvious to everyone else. Out before COVID closed the borders. Out of Ukraine before the war. Both times the signal was in the data months early, both times the move looked premature, and both times it wasn't. I mention this first because it's the most honest summary of how I work: read the system early, act before consensus, build the structure that makes the next move inevitable.

My name is Yurii Staryk. I build things — and on this site, I sign them.

One mind, not five departments

The work spans more than most people expect from one person, so let me lay out the chain plainly. Not because the breadth is the point, but because the integration is.

I'm an engineer. Seventy-two projects built, roughly 615,000 lines of code, forty in production. Test-driven, Dockerized, self-hosted, architecture documents written before the first line of code. The engine you're reading this on is one of them; the four platforms I launched recently are four more. I don't outsource the building and call myself an architect — I architect and build, which means the diagrams have to survive contact with a compiler.

I'm an operator. Fourteen years of cross-border work — coaching first, then marketing funnels, then aviation business development, then five Web3 CMO roles between 2020 and 2023 that, between them, helped raise over $15M, build audiences past 120,000, and onboard eleven thousand users. Two hundred-plus partnerships across eight commercial languages. I've sat on both sides of the table where money changes hands, which is a different education than any of them gives you alone — you learn what a deal feels like from the seat across from you, and you stop being surprised by people.

I'm a strategist and a psychologist — and I treat those as one discipline, because people and systems are the same problem read at different scales. I'm therapist-grade certified in NLPt (the Frank Pucelik branch — clinical, not the weekend-seminar kind), trained in Jungian shadow work, Dilts' neurological levels, and neuromarketing going back over a decade. I read what moves a person before they say it, and I design accordingly. Federation-graded in aikido, which taught me the only strategy I fully trust: redirect, never oppose.

And I think like an adversary. CEH-track, OSINT-fluent, comfortable in the part of security where you find the seam — the place a system's own logic turns against it — before anyone hostile does. Not because I want to break things. Because you can only build something that holds once you know exactly how it falls. No system is safe; I treat that as an engineering input, not a slogan.

Most people keep these in separate boxes — the coder, the salesperson, the strategist, the security guy. I don't, and the work shows it. A funnel insight lands inside a systems decision. A read on human behavior shapes a deployment. A closing instinct ends a technical argument. That integration isn't a bullet point on a profile. It is the profile, and it's the thing that's genuinely hard to hire, because the market produces specialists and prices the synthesis as if it didn't exist.

The reason the synthesis is rare isn't talent — it's that the paths usually diverge early. The engineer who's good with people gets pulled into management and stops shipping. The strategist who can code gets told to pick a lane. Most careers reward depth in one box and quietly punish range, so the people who could integrate these never get the decade of doing all of them on real stakes that integration actually requires. I got that decade by refusing to specialize when it would have been more comfortable to — and the compounding of those four competences in one operator is the whole of what I offer.

How the range actually fits together

People hear "fourteen years across coaching, funnels, aviation, Web3, and security" and reasonably suspect a wandering résumé. It isn't. It's one skill compounding through different domains.

Coaching taught me to model what's actually driving a person under what they say. Funnels taught me to engineer that at scale — attention as a system with stages, not a wish. Aviation business development taught me cross-border dealmaking with real liability attached, where a handshake is a contract and the contract is in three jurisdictions. Web3 dropped me into markets moving at maximum speed with maximum adversaries, where the technical, the financial, and the psychological collapse into one problem you have to read in real time. And security gave me the discipline to assume an adversary on every surface and build accordingly.

Each domain added a layer to the same instrument. By the time I started building my own products, I wasn't a coach who learned to code or a marketer who learned security. I was an operator who could read the human, architect the system, and ship the code — and knew, from scars, where each of those usually goes wrong.

The method underneath all of it

Breadth without rigor is just a long list of half-finished things. The reason the portfolio holds together is that every project runs the same disciplined process, and I'll show you the spine of it because it's the part you can actually use.

Before code, there's research and architecture. I run a question across several AI systems in parallel and treat their disagreements as the signal — where capable models diverge is exactly where the hard decisions live. I consolidate that into eight to twenty architecture documents per project, and only then build — test-first, in Docker, on infrastructure I own. Every project ships with the same six-command lifecycle, so the hundredth one starts as cleanly as the first. No "vibe coding," no magic prompt, no praying the thing holds in production. The documents exist before the code because the expensive mistakes are architectural, and you can't refactor your way out of the wrong foundation.

That's why I can carry seventy-two projects without seventy-two messes. They aren't seventy-two startups. They're nodes on one private mesh — shared infrastructure, shared method, shared connective tissue — and the mesh is the actual asset. Any single node can be extracted, hardened, and sold without disturbing the others. That's not a portfolio. It's a system for producing portfolios, and it's why "how do you ship this much alone" has a boring, repeatable answer instead of a heroic one.

Trained, not improvised

There's a version of everything I just described that's all instinct and war stories, and I distrust it. The reason I lean on certifications and documented track record isn't credentialism — it's that I'd rather claim a method than claim a gift.

The psychology is therapist-grade and dated; I can tell you which framework I'm using and why. The foresight has two documented pre-event exits behind it, not a feeling I had. The architecture has hundreds of passing tests holding the line, not my confidence that it works. When I say I read systems early, I mean I have a process for it. When I say I build things that hold, I mean there's a test suite you could run. Intuition that can't be turned into a repeatable method is just luck wearing a confident face, and luck doesn't deserve a byline.

Why my real name is on this

Everything on this site ships under my own name, and that's a deliberate constraint, not a default.

A real-name byline is a discipline: I don't write a paragraph here I wouldn't defend at a board meeting in five years. It means the edge in my work — the adversarial thinking, the willingness to question every default — has to be the defensible kind. I'll tell you where a system breaks; I won't hand you a weapon. I'll show you how influence works; I won't run it on you. The line between thinking like the adversary and being one is the entire game, and on a surface that carries my name, I stay on the right side of it in public and in private.

The practical reason is just as plain. I sell security and intelligence systems to people who run due diligence for a living. For them, this site is the due diligence — the proof that the person behind the architecture exists, ships, and means what he writes. You can't fake that with a logo and a stock photo. You earn it one signed, checkable post at a time, and the archive becomes the argument.

What I actually do for the people who hire me

Underneath the range, the offer is narrow and concrete.

I architect and build systems other people depend on, and I can do it end to end — strategy, architecture, the code itself, and the commercial logic that decides whether any of it was worth building. Sometimes that's a fractional architect's seat inside a founder's company, where I'm the technical conscience and the systems mind they can't yet hire full-time. Sometimes it's a single platform built and handed over, running on infrastructure they own. Sometimes it's the content engine this site runs on, deployed under a client's brand so their product can publish its own work and own the audience it earns.

What I don't do is consult in the abstract. I ship. The receipts are on this domain — the engine, the launched platforms, the case studies. Read them; they argue better than I can.

The clients who get the most out of working with me tend to share one trait: they've already learned that the expensive failures aren't coding failures, they're architecture and judgment failures — the feature built before anyone asked the question it answers, the platform dependency that becomes a hostage situation two years in, the system that works in the demo and falls apart under a real adversary. That's the layer I'm useful at. Anyone can be hired to write code. Fewer can tell you, before you've spent the budget, which of the three obvious approaches will still be standing when the load and the attackers and the edge cases arrive — and then build the one that will. I've made enough of those calls, across enough domains, with my own money and other people's on the line, to have a method instead of an opinion.

Where this goes

I spent a decade moving fast across countries and roles, reading the structural shifts early and pivoting before I had to. That phase is closing. What I'm doing now is consolidation — turning the mesh into things that compound, and turning the method into something other operators can run, so the leverage isn't trapped in one pair of hands.

If you build serious systems, or you need someone who can, you're in the right place. Look through the work first — that's the order I'd want it in too. Then, if there's a fit, you know where to find me, and you'll know exactly who you're talking to, because I've already shown you.

The next post is the most satisfying one to write: four platforms I just put into the world.

---

Summary

Who builds this: seventy-two projects, roughly 615,000 lines of code, four live platforms, eight commercial languages — and one method underneath all of it.

One Integrated Mind. Engineer, operator, strategist-psychologist, and adversarial thinker run as a single instrument, not separate departments — and the synthesis is the actual offer.

Compounding Range. Coaching, funnels, aviation, Web3, and security each layered one skill onto the same instrument: read systems and people early, act before consensus.

The Method. Architecture documents before code, test-first builds in Docker, one six-command lifecycle — which is why seventy-two projects aren't seventy-two messes.

Trained, Not Improvised. Therapist-grade certifications, two documented pre-event exits, and passing test suites back the claims — a method, not a gift.

A Real Name. Every post is signed and defensible; for buyers who run due diligence for a living, the archive itself is the proof.