Introducing TopTop Academy — and the Architect Track

I've added something new to what TopTop offers: TopTop Academy — one-on-one mentorship programs for engineers who want to level up, built from the same work I do for clients every day. Its first program is the Architect Track, and it's the one I've wanted to build for a long time.

Why the Architect Track

The gap between a strong senior engineer and an architect isn't about writing more code or memorizing more frameworks. Most senior engineers are already excellent at the craft. What changes at the architect level is the scope of the decisions you're trusted with — how systems are shaped, how quality holds up under load, how software actually ships, and how you move a room of people toward a decision.

That knowledge is usually picked up by osmosis: slowly, unevenly, and only if you happen to be in the right rooms. The Architect Track makes the path deliberate instead of leaving it to luck.

What's inside

The track is structured around one thing that makes it stick: at the start, you pick a real system you own or know well, and every module applies to that system. No toy examples, no throwaway exercises — the work you do maps straight back onto something you actually care about.

On top of solid engineering craft, it covers five pillars:

• Engineering craft, architect grade — module boundaries and coupling, dependency direction, designing for change, and reviewing code at the level of architecture rather than syntax.
• System design & architecture — going from real requirements and constraints to an architecture, with data as the center of gravity. You draw it in C4 and record the decisions as ADRs.
• Quality engineering — treating quality as a property of the whole system: the test pyramid, non-functional requirements, quality gates, and SLOs with error budgets.
• DevOps & delivery — CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, containers and orchestration at the depth an architect needs, observability as a design concern, and incident response and rollback.
• Management: time & people — leading without formal authority, facilitating decisions, translating between engineers and stakeholders, realistic estimation, mentoring, and managing your own attention.

It ends with a capstone: an end-to-end architecture for a real, sizeable problem, defended in an architecture review, plus a 12-month growth plan for the gaps that remain. You leave with something you've built and defended, not just a certificate.

The program runs roughly six months, one-on-one. Materials are in English, with Russian available.

Who it's for

Senior engineers who are ready to operate at the architect level — the people already being pulled into architecture and design decisions who would rather do it deliberately than improvise. If you're comfortable with the code and the hard part now is the shape of the system and the people around it, this is aimed at you.

How to join

TopTop Academy is invitation-only and one-on-one, so there's no sign-up form and no cohort to wait for. If the Architect Track sounds like where you are, get in touch and we'll talk about whether it's a fit.