etherni.io / Andrei Sinelnikov / Fractional COO, Operations Architect

Operating infrastructure for lean, funded teams.

You proved the idea. You raised the money. Now there are thirty people, everyone is busy, and somehow less gets decided every week. And every decision still waits for you.

That is not a talent problem or a strategy problem. The company outgrew the operating habits that got it funded, and nothing structured replaced them. I build the structure.

The gap

Where funded companies fail

Consulting since 2002, inside enterprises, governments, and web3 organizations, I keep seeing the same pattern: the failures that kill funded companies grow in the gap between what the organization says it is doing and how it actually operates.

I have watched that gap from both extremes: environments where authorization was so heavy that change crawled, and environments with total freedom and no structure at all. The failure looks different; the mechanism is the same. So is the fix: make accountability visible, then keep it honest.

Part of the work is asking the questions a busy team stops asking itself: does how we operate still serve what we said we are building?

What I build

Working systems, not frameworks on slides

Task governance

Cross-team workflows where ownership is visible and drift gets caught early. Built and run for a distributed, multinational, remote team with no head office to fall back on, where neither enterprise process nor no process survives.

Self-running administration

Expense reporting and time-off that route themselves from submission through approval. Nobody chases paperwork.

Asset and subscription registry

Every tool, domain, and license accounted for and current. Organizational scale changes are executed in a week, because the information exists and stays current.

Grants Intelligence

AI-assisted ingestion and scoring of funding programs, reporting, and a working pipeline. First version shipped in one week; in production, tracking 36 programs and 100+ scored leads.

Access and credential accountability

Self-hosted secrets and credential management for organizations whose security model is currently that one person knows all the passwords.

Record

Consulting since 2002

Delivered almost entirely as an outsider working inside someone else's organization, accountable from the first week without institutional cover: ramp fast, build, hand over documented. That is how I have always worked.

The rule
AI with human accountability

AI runs through everything I build: automations, agents, analysis pipelines. One rule is non-negotiable: a human reviews and approves before anything acts. Tools do not carry accountability. People do.

How I work

Fixed-scope builds. Capped retainers.

Remote, async-first, across North American and European time zones. An engagement starts with a fixed-scope infrastructure build with defined deliverables; a capped advisory retainer continues it.

What I do not do: run your payroll, manage your people, own your on-call, or firefight without a mandate to fix the process underneath.

Master of Computer Science; Certified SAFe 5 Practitioner; Verified ClickUp Power User.

Contact

If operations became your job against your will

andrei@etherni.io