Ilja Orlovs
Founder & Principal Engineer
Ilja Orlovs is the founder of Release.art and a principal engineer with over 16 years of experience designing, delivering, and reviewing software systems used in regulated and high-trust environments.
His professional background spans financial services, asset management, insurance, research, and infrastructure-intensive industries, with a particular focus on systems where reliability, auditability, and long-term operability are critical. This includes large-scale data platforms, document and knowledge processing pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and AI- and ML-enabled workflows operating under regulatory scrutiny.
Ilja has worked within and alongside major UK financial institutions, including leading engineering roles on fraud detection platforms, document aggregation and NLP systems, and large-scale data ingestion pipelines processing billions of events per day. His experience covers the full system lifecycle, from architecture and implementation through to deployment, monitoring, and operational assurance.
A consistent theme throughout Ilja’s career has been building systems that can be explained, operated, and defended over time. He has led infrastructure automation initiatives, designed reproducible data and ML pipelines, and implemented governance-aware workflows that support audit, compliance review, and controlled change. This includes designing and operating large Kafka-based event platforms, ML model deployment frameworks, and secure cloud infrastructure across AWS and Azure environments.
Rather than specialising in a single technology or domain, Ilja’s role typically involves bridging technical, operational, and regulatory perspectives. He works closely with engineering teams, compliance and risk stakeholders, and non-technical decision-makers to ensure systems align with both business objectives and governance expectations.
At Release.art, Ilja is responsible for technical direction, architecture decisions, and senior-level advisory work. He is directly involved in client engagements, particularly where systems are business-critical, long-lived, or subject to external oversight.
