Yandex Announces New CTOs for Search, Advertising, and Ridetech Businesses

Yandex is pleased to announce key appointments to its technical leadership teams.

Alexey Gusakov has been named CTO of Search, making the transition from his previous position as the Head of Machine Intelligence and Research in the Search division. Under his leadership, Yandex has introduced groundbreaking developments, including the YandexGPT large language model and the diffusion neural network that powers the Shedevrum image generation app. In his new role, Alexey will focus on further advancing large language models and integrating neural networks into Yandex's services for both the Russian and international markets.

An alumnus of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, Alexey, joined Yandex in 2015. He played a pivotal role in developing the first neural network for Search, which became the foundation for the Palekh algorithm in 2016. He also led the development of Yandex’s voice assistant Alice and coordinated the creation of the voice technologies now being used for video translation in Yandex Browser.

Valery Stromov has been appointed CTO for Advertising. For the past three years, he has been responsible for the development of the internal advertising infrastructure. Together with his team, he has achieved significant growth in the performance and reliability of core advertising services and established a scalable system for implementing neural network models. In his role as CTO, Valery will continue to advance the advertising ML platform and enhance services for advertisers and partners.

Valery graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University. Since joining Yandex in 2016, he has been working in advertising technologies, and he has helped expand the mobile inventory available to advertisers and laid the foundation for media advertising technologies.

Ilya Rubin has taken on the role of CTO for Ridetech, where he will concentrate on the technological development of existing services, including taxi, car sharing, and kick sharing, while also contributing to the launch of new Ridetech products. A graduate of the Faculty of Informatics and Control Systems at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Ilya joined Yandex in 2005. He played a crucial role in preparing the launch of the first version of Yandex Music, led the development of the initial Yandex.Browser version, and contributed to the ranking team in Search. For the past seven years, he has been the CTO of the Joom marketplace.