Stepan Pushkarev

Stepan Pushkarev is co-founder and CEO (and long-time CTO) of Provectus, an AWS-centric AI systems integrator focused on production machine learning, GenAI, data platforms, and MLOps. He treats enterprise AI as an engineering and ownership problem: get models and data platforms into production, transfer the code, and measure against outcomes rather than hours billed.

From distributed data to AI systems

Provectus's own history starts in 2010 with distributed data platforms. The firm's engineers contributed to open-source projects in the Spark, Kafka, and Presto world, then grew into analytics and cloud migration - primarily on AWS - before machine learning became the natural next layer. Pushkarev's public work sits on that same spine: production systems, not advisory theater. The company still emphasizes open-source DNA and full IP transfer on engagements so clients are not locked into proprietary tooling.

Hydrosphere and the production ML lifecycle

Before and alongside the Provectus leadership role, Pushkarev founded Hydrosphere, a platform aimed at deploying, monitoring, and retraining machine-learning models once they leave the notebook. On the Data Engineering Podcast he walked through why production ML differs from ordinary software: model quality drifts, retraining data has to be managed, and serving is only one slice of a longer lifecycle. That production bias shows up in how Provectus sells today - MLOps platforms, GenAI systems, and data foundations for enterprises already standardized on AWS.

Industry depth over generalist breadth

Under Pushkarev the firm concentrated on Healthcare & Life Sciences and Financial Services rather than chasing every vertical with a slide library. Provectus describes engagements as milestone-based, with forward-deployed executives and engineers, pre-built AI infrastructure on day one, and pricing that tracks verified outcomes. At Amazon re:MARS he has appeared with customer partners such as PepsiCo to talk about data and ML transformation work already in production, not future-state roadmaps alone.

Builder culture and extreme ownership

Provectus's public values - obsession with client and technology detail, partnership as equals, extreme ownership, and plain-spoken transparency - match how Pushkarev presents the company: builders who write code and review architectures, not a spreadsheet consulting layer. The leadership page lists him as co-founder, CTO and CEO, still close to the technical bar the firm sets for itself.