Aleksi Asikainen
Startup CTO, Chief Architect, Principal Engineer, Founding Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer
Executive Summary
20+ years of hands-on software leadership.
Senior technologist who delivers complex technology initiatives. Translates ambiguous ideas into scalable, production-grade platforms, – including customer-facing products, agentic systems, and distributed cloud environments.
Proven at 0→1, 1→N, and scale-up inflection points. Recently built a system that transforms 100+ hours of audio into structured inference every minute.
Brought in to raise the technical bar, define technical direction, execute complex work, and scale teams and systems. Advisor to founders, C-level, and VPs.
Your solution to: "How do we build this?"
Technology generalist: backend, web, mobile, desktop, data, ML/AI, QA, platform, infrastructure, and DevOps. Experience in product, design, and UX. Loves building.
Impact Case Study – Abridge
Context
Joined shortly after Series B ($30M), as the company prepared to onboard its first major enterprise customer. Engineering org (~10–15 engineers) had iterated rapidly to reach product-market fit, leaving the core audio-to-notes pipeline fragile, opaque, and increasingly risky to scale.
Role & Scope
Acted as a horizontal senior technical leader, taking ownership of cross-cutting systems with no natural product owner. Led end-to-end redesign of the core audio-to-notes processing pipeline used by multiple product verticals; served as primary technical decision-maker and on-call escalation point until ownership transitioned to a dedicated team.
Key Decisions
Reframed the audio-to-notes pipeline as a mission-critical internal product rather than a collection of ad-hoc functions.
Architected the new isolated orchestration service using domain-driven design, deliberately separating pipeline concerns from product code to reduce blast radius and cognitive load.
Selected Temporal as the workflow execution layer to enable deterministic, debuggable workflows with replay capability — trading short-term learning cost for long-term reliability and operability.
Moved execution from cloud functions to Kubernetes-based services to regain debuggability, operational control, and vendor independence.
Centralized all database writes behind the pipeline, explicitly blocking direct ML access to prevent data corruption, race conditions, and side effects.
Required telemetry and observability mechanisms to ensure reliability at scale.
Contributions
Defined and owned architecture, technical product design, and implementation of the new pipeline from the ground up.
Reverse-engineered implicit system behavior from legacy code to establish explicit baseline requirements, then defined forward-looking requirements under uncertain scale and evolving product needs.
Enforced a single standardized API boundary for all pipeline entry points, eliminating divergent implementations and making system behavior observable and predictable.
Implemented document validation schemas for all I/O operations (database, APIs, blob storage…) to ensure data integrity.
Introduced end-to-end testing, strict linting standards, structured documentation, flow diagrams where none previously existed.
Built and ran load tests to validate scaling behavior prior to broad customer migration.
Designed reusable infrastructure and project templates (CI/CD, Helm charts, service scaffolding) that later became the foundation for other engineering efforts.
Outcomes
Successfully migrated the first enterprise customer to the new pipeline within ~7 months; completed full customer migration incrementally over the next ~2 months to minimize risk.
The pipeline now processes over 100 hours of audio per minute. It has met the needs of the business through significant growth in customer base and usage volume.
Achieved a step-change improvement in system reliability, debuggability, and operational visibility; for the first time, engineers could inspect live workflow state, diagnose failures deterministically, and recover safely.
Enabled the ability to build monitoring and alarms against telemetry to reduce reaction times to production issues.
Architecture scaled with company growth and became the foundation for subsequent pipeline work.
Established reusable project templates (CI/CD, Helm charts, service layout) that were adopted across the engineering organization.
Temporal became a standard platform primitive reused well beyond the original pipeline project.
Collaboration
Worked in close partnership with the VP of Engineering, who sponsored the initiative as a critical business enabler. The project was self-initiated, proposed, and initially implemented solo before being transitioned to a dedicated team for long-term ownership.
Work History
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Abridge | 01/2024 – Present
Healthcare AI startup | 300 employees | $700M series B-E
Joined Abridge at ~30 employees. Company's first senior staff engineer.
Operated through hyper-growth and multiple funding stages (A16Z, Khosla Ventures, Elad Gil, IVP).
Drove core technical direction by leading architecture decisions and selecting foundational technologies (e.g., Temporal) that scaled with the business.
Proposed, architected, and implemented critical core systems, including large-scale orchestration of audio into structured clinical notes.
Led high-risk, high-precision internal initiatives such as major database migrations, owning design, execution, and reliability outcomes end to end.
Chief Technology Officer
Arena | 08/2021 – 12/2022
Audience engagement startup | 50 employees | $13.6M series A
Owned engineering, architecture, and IT.
Scaled the platform through Series A led by CRV, Craft Ventures, Artisanal Ventures, and Vela Partners.
Cut technical operations costs 40%+.
Established engineering practices: code reviews, CI, planning, metrics-driven operations, and standardized technical processes.
Chief Technology Officer
Optym | 10/2019 – 03/2021
B2B SaaS | Optimization & Decision Science | 250 employees | $25M revenue
Mentored senior engineers and technical leaders, reinforcing execution quality and engineering culture.
Established shared architectures, policies, and delivery standards to enable rapid product launches.
Worked directly with customers, partners, and executives to design new products, deliver bespoke solutions.
Supported Optym’s SaaS technology ventures.
Chief Architect
Solera | 06/2015 – 09/2019
Multinational | Risk management & asset protection | 6,000 employees | $1.1B revenue
Led strategic R&D and product incubation initiatives for the office of the CEO.
Assessed emerging technologies for enterprise adoption, including ML, blockchain, AR/VR, IoT/telematics, digital identity, large-scale data platforms, and cloud-native SaaS (AWS).
Head of Technology
HPI | 11/2013 – 05/2015
Private company | Automotive data & asset protection | £20M revenue
Led end-to-end product development and delivery for new consumer products, from concept through launch.
UK market leader in vehicle history checks.
(Subsidiary of Solera)
Chief Technology Officer
TalMix | 01/2013 – 10/2013
Management consulting startup | Talent search | £2M series A
Rebuilt a legacy platform into a scalable two-sided marketplace. Led search and matching improvements to increase relevance of consultant recommendations.
Led search and matching improvements to increase relevance of consultant recommendations.
Owned all technical operations.
(Previously known as MBA & Company)
Technical Director
MadBid | 06/2008 – 12/2012
Entertainment shopping startup | 75 employees | £4M Series A | £10M revenue