Philipp Gross

Engineering Manager · Solo Founder

Tbilisi, Georgia

Philipp Gross in Tbilisi
Background

Story

I started in QA, watching releases fail. Not in theory — at 2am, on the phone, while a production incident burned. I got obsessed with one question: why does shipping software have to feel like defusing a bomb every time?

So I spent ten years answering it. QA engineer to QA lead to engineering manager. At Zonatelecom I cut production incidents 3.4×. At Stenn I took release regression from 4–7 days to 20 minutes and moved nine product teams off a central QA queue onto shipping independently. At a regulated crypto company I cut production incidents by more than half. The pattern was always the same: take a delivery system that's on fire, rebuild the processes and ownership, hand back a machine that ships without heroics.

Then I wanted to know if I could build the whole machine myself. So I designed an AI-driven development pipeline and used it to ship two products end-to-end — from first idea to app stores and first paying customers — without writing the code by hand. Not a side experiment. Proof that AI, applied across the whole delivery lifecycle, changes what one person can ship.

I'm not picking a side between "engineering leader" and "solo founder." I think the interesting work lives in the gap between them. That's what I write about here.

Current projects

What I'm working on

Status

Currently

Open to: indie collaborations, CTO at a seed-stage startup, EM at a scaleup.

The fastest way to reach me is email. Referrals are worth their weight in gold.

Get in touch