From Systems to Standards: How Engineering Leadership Shapes the AdTech Industry

The adtech market is no longer in a phase of explosive experimentation. Instead, it has entered a period of steady, structural growth. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 14% through 2034. Behind this apparent stability lies a largely invisible revolution—driven by foundational systems that have become industry standards and are designed to outlive their creators.

It is within this category of enduring impact and quietly revolutionary thinking that figures like our expert, Mikhail Shakhray, belong. His distinctive view of technology and its application enabled him to initiate a near-silent transformation in AdTech through a series of innovative solutions. While much of this work took place inside leading Big Tech companies, its influence extends well beyond them. It has contributed to the emergence of a new generation of smart, data-driven AdTech tools and approaches.

Ultimately, this kind of long-term, systems-level innovation helped create the conditions for today's sustained market growth—where progress is no longer episodic, but continuous, cumulative, and quietly transformative. To shed light on how solutions capable of reshaping entire industries come to life, Mikhail Shakhray shares his approach to building next-generation products.

Recognised Expertise Beyond a Single Company

While the market rarely knows its true heroes—most technological breakthroughs are built without promoting the names of the craftsmen behind them—Mikhail represents a different case. Beyond being a recognised expert with a well-established personal presence on LinkedIn, often described as an alma mater for software engineers, his professional reputation is most clearly reflected in the calibre of companies that actively sought him out.

During his time at Yandex, the CIS-based Big Tech company behind the region's leading search engine and a broad digital ecosystem, Mikhail led product development in one of the most influential adtech markets in the region. The solutions he helped design fundamentally reshaped how advertising technologies operate at scale. As these approaches began to influence global practices, Mikhail emerged as one of the most sought-after adtech specialists internationally.

This trajectory led him to Microsoft, where he continued to focus on what he does best: improving advertising-related products through applied machine learning and data-driven optimisation. His next step was Shopify—a destination well known among global eCommerce and platform engineers—which by that point had already evolved into a sustainable advertising platform rather than a pure eCommerce solution. There, Mikhail builds technically sophisticated advertising solutions directly within the search core.

Each transition marked not just a career move, but a step into a more influential and strategically significant role. Beyond product impact, Mikhail is also known as a change-maker within large organisations. His latency benchmarking tools were adopted into CI pipelines, setting new corporate internal performance standards. Meanwhile, initiatives such as Random Coffee—originally created for a large Yandex team—expanded far beyond a single company, gaining traction well outside the Big Tech and even beyond the CIS region.

Building Technologies That Redefined Industry Practice

Building a single novel solution is one thing. Creating technology that gives rise to an entire ecosystem of tools is what constitutes true industry-level impact. Adv Machine—a universal recommendation engine authored and fully developed by Mr. Shakhray—did exactly that. It enabled capabilities that were previously unavailable to the market, largely because it was designed for speed and flexibility. Integrating new features into Adv Machine was significantly faster and easier than into alternative systems, which in turn accelerated downstream innovation.

As a result, multiple high-impact products were built on top of it. These included Spy Machine, an AI-based recommendation engine, and Autotargeting—an advertising technology that moved beyond keyword-based targeting altogether. Through Adv Machine, Mikhail effectively brought the future closer, positioning advertising as one of the most technologically advanced industries at the time.

Over time, Adv Machine also became the foundation for several of Mikhail's later projects that went on to define industry standards and remain relevant today. One prominent example is ANN search. It's a technique that enables large-scale systems to rapidly identify the most relevant or similar items by trading negligible accuracy for the speed required in real-time search, recommendations, and advertising. Notably, this solution was launched in production roughly six months before comparable implementations appeared in major CIS search platforms.

This was not the only instance where Mikhail's work outpaced prevailing industry practices. Real-time user-level recommendations, for example, are still rarely implemented at scale globally. Today, only a handful of platforms—such as Facebook(Meta) and TikTok—are widely believed to operate comparable systems in production.

A Quiet Form of Leadership That Endures

In mature technology markets, the most enduring forms of leadership are rarely the most visible. They manifest not through constant public presence, but through systems that continue to evolve, teams that carry ideas forward, and standards of thinking that quietly become the norm. Over time, this kind of influence extends beyond any single product or organisation and begins to shape the professional culture around it.

In Mikhail's case, that influence is reflected in the communities that recognise and rely on his expertise. He is invited to share his perspective at major industry events, including CTO Day hosted by Yandex in Belgrade.

More importantly, his impact is visible in the people who have worked with him. Under his guidance—or as a direct consequence of collaboration—multiple engineers progressed to senior and lead positions. Others went on to build careers at global technology companies such as Apple, Meta, Google, and Pinely. This ability to cultivate talent is a defining trait of leaders whose influence compounds over time.

At the core of this approach lies a consistent philosophy: strong professionals must understand more than their immediate area of responsibility. By encouraging engineers to engage with adjacent systems, business realities, and organisational constraints, Mikhail enables broader thinking and more meaningful communication with senior stakeholders—bringing insights from the operational level to where strategic decisions are made.

His leadership style is equally grounded in data. By working directly with raw datasets and investing the time to extract signals from noise, he is able to surface insights that help executive teams focus on what truly matters and inform product decisions that improve outcomes for users. This hands-on, data-driven perspective is particularly valued at the executive level, where such depth is rarely available through standard management layers.

Ultimately, this combination of technical depth, people development, and systemic thinking defines a form of leadership that does not seek visibility, yet steadily earns it. Such leadership continues to shape both impactful products and professionals long after the original work is done.