# Ilia Mogilevsky

Ilia Mogilevsky is an Engineering Manager in Melbourne, Australia, leading a team across 3 continents at PactFlow, part of SmartBear. Ilia has been building software since 2007 and now focuses on AI-assisted engineering. Ilia is also the creator of ShutterTime, a photography planning app.

Canonical page: https://www.mogilevsky.com.au/
Last updated: 2026-11-10

## Career

| Years | Organisation | Role | Work |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 2022 to now | PactFlow (SmartBear) | Engineering Manager | Leads a team spread across 3 continents, building contract-testing tools on top of the open-source Pact framework. |
| 2018 to 2022 | Astute Payroll | Chief Architect, Team Lead | Brought a large legacy payroll system back under control, then built the new parts event-driven and serverless on AWS. |
| 2015 to 2018 | Hanes Brands | Team Lead | Designed the MultiBrand order-processing platform behind omni-channel and Click & Collect, and moved the team onto gitflow and real code review. |
| 2012 to 2015 | Combitel | Senior Software Engineer | Built the REST API and middleware for the Omniscreen pilot, plus JavaScript libraries that had to run on all sorts of set-top boxes and TVs. |
| 2007 to 2011 | Hanes Brands | Senior Developer | |

Education: Bachelor of Computing, Monash University.

## How Ilia works

- **Leadership:** cares about how a team collaborates and how it feels about the work, so a small team can get good outcomes without heroics.
- **Architecture:** years inside big legacy monoliths, refactoring them until they are stable enough to keep building on.
- **Integration:** designs large integrations, then stays hands-on through the build instead of handing over a diagram.
- **Toolkit:** PHP, JavaScript, Python, Swift; MySQL, PostgreSQL; AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, SES, SAM and CloudFormation; event-driven and serverless systems; Docker and CI/CD.

## AI transformation

Ilia's position: agents should do real engineering work, with the quality bar going up, not down.

- **Evidence:** 2,410 of the 2,634 commits in ShutterTime's first year were co-authored with an AI agent, as of November 2026. One engineer, shipping to web, iPhone and Android.
- **Agent skills:** with the PactFlow team, Ilia helped turn PactFlow's contract-testing onboarding method into a skill any coding agent can run. See [PactFlow agent skills](https://github.com/pactflow/pactflow-agent-skills).
- **Gates, not trust:** agent-written code is not done until mutation testing and CRAP scores say so. A green test suite is only the starting point.
- **Specs before code:** a requirement turns into a change spec that cites its evidence across every repo it touches, and an engineer signs off at each checkpoint.
- **Reviewable plans:** agents write structured plans, and engineers comment on them like a document and approve before anything runs.

## ShutterTime

[ShutterTime](https://shuttertime.com.au) is Ilia's own product, from first commit to the app stores. It helps photographers know which of their spots will be good, and when.

- Keeps an eye on weather, tides, moon, sun and aurora forecasts around the clock.
- Turns 28 tracked conditions into one 0 to 100 score per location.
- Covers seven kinds of photography: landscape, astrophotography, seascape, waterfall, aurora, woodland and cityscape.
- Available on the web, on [iPhone and iPad](https://apps.apple.com/app/shuttertime/id6757139424), and on Android.
- Free for the first 5 spots. Paid plan: A$4.99 a month or A$49.99 a year on the web.
- Built with Laravel 12, Vue 3 and Capacitor.

## Other work

- Earlier public work: urbanscapes.com.au, whywhitepages.com.au, snickerssessions.com.au, slapastory.com, numberplates4fun.com.

## Photography

Outside work, Ilia photographs landscapes, especially trees in fog, usually early: 18 of 23 recent keepers were made before 10am.

- [Escavea Photography](https://escavea.pixieset.com/photography/): landscape prints.
- [Melbourne photography guide](https://www.rexby.com/Ilia) on Rexby.

## Contact and profiles

- Email: ilia@mogilevsky.com.au
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mogilevsky)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/ilia)
- [Instagram](https://instagram.com/ilia_m)