Some engineers move fast. Others move with impact. Valerii Mankvoskyi, a DevOps specialist with a unique blend of technical mastery and social purpose, does both.
In the fast-evolving world of DevOps, where new tools and paradigms emerge every month, it’s easy to get caught up in the race for optimisation. But for Valerii, DevOps has always been more than CI/CD pipelines and containers – it’s about empowering people, solving complex problems, and building infrastructure that matters.
Whether he’s mentoring a startup team, optimising cloud infrastructure for a research hospital, or volunteering his time to help refugees access mental health support, Valerii has become known not just for his skill – but for his intention.
We sat down with him to explore the story behind the code.
From Project Manager to DevOps Architect: A Shift in Mindset
Valerii didn’t start his career as a DevOps engineer. His early work was in project management, overseeing the development of digital platforms across web, desktop, and mobile — often for internal use in enterprise environments. But even then, he was fascinated by what happened “under the hood.”
“I kept seeing the same problem,” he recalls. “We’d spend months building products, only to realise that deployment, scaling, or integration would become bottlenecks. I started to realise that the system behind the product is just as important as the product itself.”
That insight sparked a shift. Valerii immersed himself in cloud architecture and DevOps methodologies, learning from the ground up – mastering Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, and more. What started as curiosity became a passion, and before long, companies began seeking him out not just as a developer, but as a system thinker – someone who could design scalable, future-proof infrastructure.
The Inspeere Project: Building a Hybrid Data Backup Solution
In early 2023, Valerii was invited to work with Inspeere, a French startup specialising in distributed data protection. The company had developed a revolutionary approach to data backup called DATIS, which fragments, encrypts, and distributes files across decentralised nodes, providing robust protection against cyberattacks and infrastructure failures.
Valerii took on the role of DevOps architect and lead engineer to build a proof of concept for the system, combining Docker, AWS S3, and secure encryption protocols. His work included designing the architecture, building the backend with Flask, and integrating it with AWS S3 via Boto3.
“The challenge was making a concept like DATIS not just theoretically viable but operationally efficient. The real-world application required precision in data handling and seamless integration with existing cloud infrastructures.”
The prototype demonstrated the hybrid backup system’s effectiveness, garnering attention from Bpifrance and leading to a partnership with the startup.
The system’s innovative approach to data storage — using ZFS snapshots, zfec erasure coding, and PyNaCl encryption – has since become a key differentiator for Inspeere, attracting significant interest from investors.
“Helping companies improve security while saving on infrastructure costs has been incredibly rewarding. With DATIS, I knew we were building something that could reshape how industries think about data safety.”
The CHU Poitiers Project: Empowering Healthcare with AI
In the middle of 2023, Valerii’s expertise took him into the world of AI in healthcare. CHU Poitiers, a prestigious French university hospital, was working on an AI system to predict PD-L1 status in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, based on multimodal PET and CT scans. This prediction would assist doctors in deciding whether immunotherapy was appropriate for the patient.
Volunteering his time, Valerii helped build the REST API for the system and integrated the backend using Flask. His contribution involved crafting a binary classification model based on EfficientNet-B0, modified for two-channel input.
“The aim was to create a system that was both fast and medically accurate. We had to ensure that the AI could handle vast amounts of data without compromising on reliability.”
His role extended to optimising the data pipeline, ensuring that medical images (PET and CT scans) could be processed, normalised, and converted into tensors before feeding into the model. This seamless integration of AI into a hospital’s research infrastructure is a critical step toward advancing predictive diagnostics in oncology.
Despite not being listed as an author in the resulting publication in Nature Scientific Reports, Valerii received a heartfelt thank-you note from one of the lead authors, Olena Tankyevych, praising his contributions.
“This project was about more than just coding. It was about contributing to an initiative that could save lives. The fact that we are using AI to improve healthcare is why I do this work.”
FemSMS: Supporting Refugees with Technology
In early 2024, Valerii was approached by Kristen Ali Eglinton, Executive Director of the Footage Foundation, after meeting her at a conference in Paris focused on supporting Ukrainian refugees. The foundation was developing FemSMS, a mental health and support service for displaced women in Ukraine, delivered via SMS.
Valerii, eager to contribute to a project that aligned with his values, took on the role of volunteer technical consultant. He provided guidance on the application architecture and SMS platform, helping to redesign the backend in a way that would both optimise performance and reduce costs.
“The initial budget for the development and hosting was around $100,000. After reviewing the architecture, I proposed a solution that brought the cost down to just $65,000. It was about finding efficient solutions that aligned with their needs.”
Valerii’s architectural improvements allowed FemSMS to scale quickly while maintaining cost-efficiency, enabling it to become a vital service for displaced Ukrainian women needing psychological support.
“In tech, we often talk about scalability and performance. But the real reward is knowing that the work we do enables something much bigger – a chance to help people when they need it most.”
What’s Next: AI in DevOps and Purpose-Driven Engineering
Looking ahead, Valerii is doubling down on AI-enhanced infrastructure. From intelligent log analysis and anomaly detection to predictive scaling and self-healing systems, he’s exploring ways to make DevOps not just reactive but proactive.
“We’re entering an era where your infrastructure doesn’t just run your code – it understands it, predicts its needs, and optimises itself. That’s the next horizon, and I want to help people get there.”
But more than anything, Valerii wants to keep showing up – for startups, for research teams, for organisations trying to make the world a little better.
“Engineering gives you power – the power to build. What matters is what you build for.”
Whether it’s through a Slack message to a startup founder or an API endpoint serving cancer researchers, Valerii Mankvoskyi continues to make his mark — one container, one commit, and one cause at a time.
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