About
Cool Consulting is Slava I. Maslennikov — a principal engineer in Seattle, Washington, working remote across US time zones and abroad.
I run the engagements. For work that needs more than one pair of hands, I pull in specialists I've worked with directly, or partner with other consultancies to deliver at scale. You always know who is doing the work, because you've met them.
The honest shape of the business
There is no bench sitting idle, and no account manager between you and the engineer. That’s deliberate. It means the person scoping your project is the person building it, and the team is assembled for your problem rather than staffed from whoever is unbilled this month.
For a platform build or an AI product, that’s usually one to three people. For a migration spanning an org, it’s a partner team with us leading — which is exactly the shape of the GCP and Workspace migration we ran.
Every engagement so far has come from a referral. Someone who had worked with us brought us in; we have never made a cold call, and there is no salesperson here to make one. That’s worth stating plainly because of what it costs the other person — a referral spends the referrer’s own credibility, which is a considerably higher bar than a quote on a website. Our clients’ work is under NDA and we don’t publish testimonials, but references are available on request.
Where this comes from
Ten years of building and running cloud platforms, most of it in consulting:
- Senior Engineering Manager, Infrastructure Modernization at SADA (2021–2025). Launched an engineering office in Yerevan, Armenia — hired and trained 12–15 engineers — and aligned distributed delivery across the US, Canada, India, Armenia, and the UK. Productized five infrastructure-modernization offerings end to end: scope, packaging, and go-to-market. Helped sustain the Google Cloud Infrastructure Modernization Partner Specialization through biennial audits across seven years.
- Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at SADA (2018–2021). Migrations and greenfield builds across AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes, embedded with client teams. CI/CD and infrastructure as code in Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.
- Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Grindr (2017–2018). AWS as code, release automation, and a fleet migration off legacy Ubuntu.
- Platform Engineer at Nordstromrack.com (2016–2017). Hybrid AWS and GCP with Terraform, and a containerized routing layer for traffic management.
Cool Consulting, LLC has been the vehicle for this work since 2024.
Beyond client work
The R&D is not a hobby that happens to be adjacent — it’s where a lot of the credibility comes from. We run hands-on Meshtastic workshops at security conferences (BSidesPDX ‘25, BSides Seattle ‘26, SCaLE 23x), speak at BSides Las Vegas and LayerOne, and publish the firmware, tooling, and hardware designs on the Cool Consulting GitHub org.
Working languages: English and Russian, with working Spanish, French, and Polish.
A paragraph is plenty — where you are, where you want to be, and what's in the way.