Alla Klimenko and the Business of Staying

In 2019, Alla Klimenko described a working day that began with a short walk through Bishkek and soon reached clients in America, Europe and Australia. Her office was close; her customers were not. By the afternoon, a conversation on a screen could carry her halfway around the world without requiring a trip to the airport.

That arrangement contained a larger ambition. Klimenko had already spent a stretch working in Almaty, returning to Bishkek on weekends. She knew the familiar bargain: opportunity elsewhere, home here. Mad Devs, the software company she co-founded in 2016, offered another arrangement. A team could sell its skills abroad while giving people a reason to build their careers where they were.

There is a practical streak running through her story. International expansion brings a budget. A promising application needs customers. A developer needs room to work, and somebody has to answer when the client asks what happened. Klimenko has made a career of taking that last seat at the table.

The engineer who preferred the conversation

Her route into technology began with people who made it tangible. Her father was an engineer who could repair electronics. A computer science teacher brought in to prepare her school class for competitions changed the way she thought. Mathematics and physics were subjects she did well in; computing became something she wanted to pursue deliberately.

She attended International Ataturk Alatoo University from 2004 to 2009 and holds a master’s degree in software engineering. The technical education mattered even as her work moved toward managing projects, negotiating with customers and running a business.

Her early career included project management at a web and marketing agency and leadership of the SEO and app-store optimisation department at Namba Media. Those jobs put her between several groups with different definitions of a successful day: the people making something, the people trying to sell it and the people paying for it.

In 2017, she recalled an early promotion with unusual frankness. Becoming a department head meant accepting responsibility for other people’s decisions. When a customer arrived to discuss the result, she would be the person doing the explaining. The title came with a destination for the awkward questions.

Before the pitch deck, the taxi

The team that became Mad Devs had already worked together on Namba. The project began in 2010, when investors backed a local online-content platform for Central Asia. Expensive external internet traffic and slow connections shaped the opportunity. Local infrastructure affected what people could watch and how quickly they could get it.

The developers added features in stages, including chat, video and music. Kyrgyzstan served as a testing ground before releases in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. The work brought growing traffic, more user uploads and the need to serve material to many people at once. This was an education in keeping systems functioning after people had begun to depend on them.

Transport added another set of demands. Klimenko was among the project managers on Namba Taxi, a team engagement that ran from 2013 to mid-2020. A passenger saw a way to order a car. Behind that small action sat tools for drivers, dispatchers, managers and quality control.

A taxi application is an excellent antidote to software vanity. The car must arrive. The various people arranging that arrival need different information, and the service keeps changing as the business grows. The work continues long after the pleasing moment when an app first appears on a phone.

A company for people who wanted more work

Mad Devs emerged in 2016 from colleagues who wanted broader challenges. That origin gives the company’s name a fairly ordinary explanation: experienced developers looking for more interesting problems. The ambition was substantial, even if the raw material was a group of people who already knew how to work together.

By 2018, the business had more than 50 employees and customers reaching from Southeast Asia to Britain and Australia. Klimenko handled sales herself, with work arriving through recommendations. For a young services company, that places considerable weight on each relationship. A satisfied customer can become the introduction to the next one.

Her preference was for sustained engagements. Longer projects let the team understand a business, improve its systems and stay involved as it grows. The same preference helps explain her caution about building applications merely because a business owner fancies having one. She has argued that a small clothing shop might manage perfectly well through social media.

There is a certain charm in a software executive discussing when to avoid buying software. It suggests an understanding of the transaction beyond the invoice. A product has to earn the trouble of being built.

The address was part of the argument

Bishkek mattered because people could leave it. Klimenko’s argument for the local technology industry was that worthwhile pay and worthwhile work could persuade them to stay. The international market gave a Kyrgyz team access to customers whose businesses operated on a very different economic scale.

That ambition also raised the question of who got to join. In September 2017, Klimenko spoke to participants in #ProgrammerAyimdar, a project aimed at expanding women’s economic opportunities through practical technology skills and leadership training. Her own career had required moving through rooms where women were a minority.

She has described encountering men who resisted having a woman as their manager. She has also encouraged women to judge their prospects by their abilities rather than by assumptions about who belongs in technology. Those are grounded concerns: applying for the job, taking responsibility and being allowed to do it.

International reach required its own adjustments. By March 2019, a London office was in the plans. Klimenko was thinking about costs and a sales strategy, while keeping the engineering operation in Bishkek. The geographical idea came with arithmetic. London rent would not become cheaper simply because the company had an appealing story.

Give the awkward question a place to go

Today, her responsibilities at Mad Devs include products and services, finances, project management and risk. The executive team also includes Oleg Puzanov as chief strategy officer and Andrew Sapozhnikov as CTO/CIO. Their different responsibilities make visible the range of work involved in an engineering company beyond engineering itself.

Klimenko’s writing on corporate culture describes employees proposing changes through Mad Devs Enhancement Proposals. The examples are pleasingly concrete: a bicycle stand, payment for articles written by specialists, a choice of lunch providers. Culture reaches the place where somebody leaves a bicycle in the morning.

The same account describes sessions where employees can question the founders, including questions that were not submitted in advance. That small provision matters. Prepared answers have their uses; an unexpected question tests whether a conversation is actually open.

The work practices extend that logic across distance. Decisions are documented, routine work is automated where possible and teams communicate asynchronously. Each practice reduces the amount of knowledge that exists only in one person’s head or in a meeting somebody could not attend. For a company selling collaboration across borders, those details are part of the service.

The reminder that became a second business

A recurring management problem eventually became Enji. Remote teams needed to report progress, but daily calls were difficult across time zones. Written stand-ups helped. Getting everybody to submit them consistently created another chore, which led to a reminder bot called Comedian.

The bot acquired more responsibilities, including gathering worklogs. The team was developing these approaches in 2018; Enji emerged as an independent product within Mad Devs in 2021. A tool for nudging people to write an update had become a way to understand the organisation.

Enji now brings together activity from work tools to help managers examine delivery and make decisions. Klimenko is its CEO and co-founder as well as Mad Devs’ CEO. As of October 2026, she also serves as CEO of Enji AI LLC. The second business has a direct connection to the first business’s daily difficulties.

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It allows me to see my company in numbers.

Alla Klimenko / on using Enji

A manager needs a view of budgets and progress that can survive the journey out of a technical conversation. Enji packages a problem Klimenko had been addressing in person for years.

The current products extend into AI-assisted project work and code review. That makes the old management question newly relevant: how does a person responsible for the outcome understand what happened inside the work? Greater speed gives that question more occasions to be asked.

Room for another world

Klimenko’s public writing also reaches beyond the company itself. Her September 2024 article examines banking’s digital transformation, including changes to infrastructure, customer experience and operating processes. The subjects fit a career spent connecting what software can do with the organisation expected to use it.

The company’s present scale is larger than the early Bishkek office: Mad Devs describes more than 120 engineers and data scientists and more than 150 clients served. Those are company figures, and they describe collective work. Klimenko’s place in that work remains the coordination of people, commercial decisions and responsibility.

There is room in the earlier portrait for a less managerial appetite, too. In 2019 she described reading fiction before bed, with Charles Maclean’s The Watcher on the go. Books offered access to unfamiliar worlds. An international software business provided another kind of encounter with lives taking place elsewhere.

The appealing thread is how often her ambitions return to something practical. Give capable people a reason to stay. Understand the customer before building the application. Put the decisions somewhere the team can find them. Make the work comprehensible to the person who has to answer for it. Each sounds modest until you try doing it every day.