Infrastructure depth, organizational leadership.

I’m Yuri Kolesnikov, an Austin-area technology leader with more than 20 years of experience building, scaling, and modernizing IT operations.

My career has taken me from hands-on systems administration to Director and Head of IT roles across startups, established technology companies, service providers, and venture capital. I’ve built distributed teams, supported rapid business growth, consolidated data centers, migrated large-scale storage environments, and introduced cloud identity, endpoint management, and SaaS governance.

At Skydio, I led IT through a period of significant expansion, supporting manufacturing, engineering, corporate offices, and field operations. At Zenfolio, I led infrastructure modernization and global operations. In my current role at KERV Interactive, I lead cloud-first IT operations with a focus on security, identity, SaaS management, and responsible enterprise AI adoption.

My approach is practical: understand the business, simplify where possible, automate repeatable work, and build security into everyday operations.

Alongside my leadership roles, I provide independent technology consulting, including infrastructure assessments, network design, security hardening, IT strategy, and development of client IT teams.

Education

M.S., Electronic Engineering
Transport and Telecommunication Institute (TSI) — Riga, Latvia

Beyond work

Member of the TechExec Network and the Evanta CIO Community. Fluent in English and Russian.