About

I’m Pavel (Paul) Panov, an engineering leader and former CTO working at the intersection of applied AI, R&D and product development. I live in Vilnius and hold Lithuanian residency.

What I’ve done

• Planner 5D, Tech Lead of Labs (R&D), 2022–2025. Led R&D: explored emerging technologies, built prototypes and evaluated their potential for the product.
• Game Insight, Development Lead (R&D), 2019–2022. Designed and launched systems that raised ARPU across the studio’s flagship titles.
• Elbi Digital, CTO, 2018–2019, London. Led the engineering behind global philanthropy campaigns with micro-donation flows for partners.
• Plague, co-founder and CTO, 2014–2018, Vilnius. Invented a location-based mechanism for spreading information virally, and built a short-form content recommendation engine before TikTok made the format mainstream.
• We Heart Pics, co-founder and mobile tech lead, 2011–2014. Built a cross-platform GPU-shader image-processing library for iOS and Android, and grew the user base through Instagram shout-outs at $0.10 per install.
• Rambler, iOS developer, 2010–2011. Shipped four consumer apps, including Russia’s first restaurant-guide app, which reached #1 overall in the Russian App Store.
• Peregrine, co-founder and iOS developer, 2009–2010. Russia’s first mobile-app studio: seven consumer apps, including the country’s first geo-social networking app.

Education: Master’s degree in Computer Systems and Networks, Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

Now: thinking and writing about where AI is heading and how to keep it safe.

Elsewhere: LinkedIn