Vadim Solovey wanted a motorbike. He worked during his summer holidays, saving toward a deal with his parents: whatever he earned, they would match. Then his mother revised the terms. They would buy him a personal computer instead, and he could keep his money. A teenager anticipating an engine was being offered a keyboard. He was displeased, accepted, and soon found himself spending days and sometimes nights at the machine.
It is an unusually appropriate beginning for the co-founder and CEO of DoiT. His working life would involve repeated negotiations between what technology promises and what people actually receive. The first substitution worked out rather well. Others have required considerably more engineering.
Today his territory includes cloud infrastructure, software purchasing and the question of who should pay for an AI workload. The subjects sound abstract until a bill arrives. Solovey has made a career in the space between the abstraction and the invoice, where someone eventually has to explain the numbers.
The business AWS interrupted
He began his professional career as a software engineer in 1995. Within a few years, he had co-founded a business building data centers for large organizations. This was substantial, physical infrastructure, the sort of business in which capacity had to be assembled before it could be sold. Then AWS arrived, and the calculation changed.
His initial response was apprehension. A company offering computing on demand could threaten a company building data centers. Yet the principles appealed to him: elasticity, paying for what was needed, and room to scale. He tried reproducing some of those ideas within his existing technology. Eventually the business was sold; he left in 2010.
DoiT followed in 2011. The opportunity he described was practical: organizations could adopt the public cloud without getting all the benefits they expected. Expertise and software could help close that gap. Flexibility was available, but using it economically took work. The customer still needed someone who understood the machinery.
His technical interests also appeared in public teaching. A Reversim Summit proposal in 2016 offered to explain Kubernetes in five minutes. Another covered Apache Beam and the tradeoffs among correctness, latency and cost in processing data. His instructor biography at BigData Boutique identified him as an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Google Developer Expert. These are reminders that the executive biography began with systems to understand and explain.
The engineer gets more departments
In February 2019, Solovey announced a change in his own responsibilities. He would become general manager of DoiT’s EMEA business, adding sales, marketing, finance, legal and operations to his remit. Yoav Toussia-Cohen would remain CEO while shifting attention toward expansion in the Americas. The company was dividing up the work of becoming international.
That announcement is a revealing career marker. A founder could no longer concentrate only on whether a technical solution worked. There were markets to enter, customers to support and business functions to coordinate. The organization needed its own architecture. Solovey’s description of the restructuring placed him squarely inside that less glamorous construction project.
Later that year, DoiT announced an investment exceeding $100 million from Charlesbank. It was the company’s first outside investment round, structured partly as a stock transaction and partly as a credit line. DoiT then employed 60 people. Solovey said the money would support expansion in North America and Europe, along with strategic acquisitions. He also wanted to enter Asia.
By April 2024, Toussia-Cohen had left, and Solovey became sole CEO after serving as co-CEO and CTO. At that point DoiT had more than 3,000 customers in over 70 countries. The change brought one person’s name to the top of an organization whose work had become much larger than any individual’s technical contribution.
The chronology matters because it resists the neat story of an engineer abruptly discovering management. Solovey had already been taking on commercial and operational responsibilities for years. The title caught up with a widening job. Cloud infrastructure remained the subject; running the company required additional tools.
A company with users on the inside
Solovey describes the organization as a product, with employees as its users. It is a useful way to make a managerial idea concrete. Products have confusing interfaces, unnecessary steps and features that seemed sensible to the designer. So do companies. Someone has to notice the friction before everyone becomes accustomed to it.
“I treat the company like a product, where employees are the users.”
Vadim Solovey
DoiT’s chief people officer, Kristen Tronsky, has described his preference for being “tightly aligned but loosely coupled.” Her account included deliberate internal communication, employee surveys and opportunities to question executives. Independence needs shared information if it is going to produce coordinated work. Otherwise a distributed company risks becoming a collection of people confidently solving different problems.
A July 2026 account of DoiT’s recruiting tools gives that philosophy a setting. Solovey described a careers page whose filters failed to show all the relevant jobs. The recruiting team knew the defect. With an engineer embedded in the team and AI coding tools, they rebuilt the site and developed internal applications.
The detail he found surprising was that recruiters could read the written specifications and correct them. They knew how interviews worked and how jobs were classified. Their expertise improved the instructions before software was built. Solovey judged the embedded engineer partly by how much the team could eventually ship independently. The company-as-product idea had reached a broken filter.
The arithmetic follows him home
Three weeks earlier, his writing had turned to DoiT’s own software purchasing. The company had used Zendesk since 2011. By the 2026 renewal, Solovey said, automation and improved self-service meant it needed 175 seats rather than 279. A smaller requirement seemed likely to produce a correspondingly smaller bill. Procurement supplied a plot twist.
According to his account, the first quotation kept the total unchanged by increasing the price per seat. Negotiations brought the bill down by about 10 percent, against a usage reduction of roughly 35 percent. He said DoiT would renew once more and then leave. These were his descriptions of the negotiation, and his decision about what to do next.
The episode gives his professional interests an ordinary setting. Even a business that helps customers understand technology spending has renewal documents of its own. Efficiency can change consumption without changing a supplier’s expectations. The result is a discussion about incentives that happens to involve a calculator.
Follow the work, then follow the money
There is a more modest example of Solovey’s approach in a developer discussion from March 2018. Google Cloud Dataproc could provision clusters quickly, but his teams needed autoscaling. He posted that DoiT had open-sourced Shamash to handle it, and shared the repository. A missing capability became a tool other people could inspect.
Another 2018 proposal described replacing Mixpanel with an event-analytics system using BigQuery, Apache Beam and Kubernetes for Jelly Button. The title claimed annual savings exceeding $240,000. That was a specific project claim, rather than a universal saving available to every company. Its interest lies in the connection: an architectural decision could have a measurable business consequence.
As CEO, he has pursued that connection through acquisitions as well. DoiT bought Kubernetes optimization company PerfectScale in February 2025. Solovey emphasized its usability and the possibility of optimizing cost while maintaining performance and resilience. The purchase extended the company’s ability to act on workloads, alongside explaining their expense.
In January 2026, SELECT brought Snowflake optimization into the portfolio. Solovey’s announcement focused on data platforms whose spending was difficult to understand: idle warehouses, inefficient queries and fluctuating bills. The technology would become PerfectScale for Snowflake. His argument was that cost management should follow the infrastructure as its shape changed.
AI adds another turn. Introducing Attribute in July 2026, he asked how spending could be assigned to customers, features and agents when they shared models, gateways and computing resources. A total from a provider could be visible while the economics of an individual customer remained obscure. The product aimed to connect actual consumption with the work responsible for it.
Conceptual illustration of the attribution problem Solovey describes.
His December 2025 writing had examined an even less theatrical difficulty: billing APIs can change historical data when credits arrive late or usage is recalculated. Fetching yesterday’s numbers once may leave a dashboard wrong later. It is a fitting technical concern for someone whose work depends on making costs intelligible. The chart can be beautifully drawn and still need another fetch.
By October 20, 2026, he was describing another small piece of the same puzzle: daily RunPod GPU costs in Cloud Intelligence. His update distinguished prepaid credit top-ups from actual consumption by a pod, endpoint or GPU. It is a technical distinction with a familiar consequence. Buying credit tells you what left the bank; understanding the work requires a more detailed account.
The road he might have taken
Asked about an alternative life, Solovey answered: “Probably a farmer.” He spoke about the connection to soil, plants and animals. He also admitted learning poker to join his friends and being poor at it. These are welcome details in a biography otherwise occupied by resource allocation. A founder can enjoy a game without turning it into a leadership lesson.
The motorbike remains the more consequential detour. A bargain changed, a computer arrived, and an interest took hold. Years later Solovey would change direction again when cloud computing challenged the business he understood. His career has kept moving toward the practical questions left behind by those changes: who uses the technology, what gets easier, and whether the bill makes sense.