I was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1986. Growing up in a family of architects and engineers, from early childhood I was surrounded by books on art, architecture and design. And even though throughout my teenage years I was sure I'd become a brain surgeon, artistic background took over, and medical ambitions slowly faded away.
After finishing school I got into music and convinced myself that becoming a rock star is the only viable path in life. Soon I realized that playing drums in smoky clubs is not the most reliable source of income, and started looking for more financially secure ways to apply myself. I landed my first job as an animation artist at a small studio producing music videos and promo reels. Later, I switched to graphic design and illustration, but after stumbling upon Steve Krug's "Don't make me think", I shifted my focus on interaction and web design.
In 2010 I moved to Sweden. After getting my Masters Degree in Östersund, I started my job hunt in the country. Perhaps as a lucky coincidence, Ubisoft Massive studio in Malmö was looking for just an empoyee with my set of skills — UI design and front-end development. Being a game nerd at the time, I was very excited to join. I ended up staying with the company for over 5 years, growing into a design lead for the Uplay project, which later became known as Ubisoft Connect.
Later I realized it was time to expand my expertise beyond computer screens, and having secured an offer from Volvo Cars, moved to Gothenburg. Starting out as an interaction designer for infotainment, I soon joined the HEAD project (Human Experience of Autonomous Drive). In this role, I got a chance to work with lots of extraordinary people, research and conceptualize the autonomous driving future. In the meantime, together with some of the best developers I've met, I was building a prototyping platform based on web technologies, which enabled my collegaues to realize their concepts in cars and test them in real traffic.
After two years at Volvo Cars, I moved to Stockholm, following my wife's new work assigment. There I started as a product designer at one of the leading video streaming services in the Nordics, Viaplay. In that role, I got a chance to further expand my expertise not only in designing digital products, but in building agile product teams.
After a year at Viaplay, my passion for gaming brought me back into the industry, and in the early 2020 I started at DICE, an Electronic Arts-owned game development studio behind the Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront and Mirror's Edge series to work on the next installment of the Battlefield series, Battlefield 2042.
Despite plenty of work opportunities, Stockholm didn't succeed in conquering my heart and mind, and in 2021 me and my wife found ourselves back in Gothenburg. I joined an electric car manufacturer Polestar as a UX Strategist, where I'm employed at the moment.