CTO Meetup w/ Boyko Karadzhov (Payhawk): Engineering at Unicorn & Centaur Scale
Join us in Haos Community Space Artklasa for a conversation with Boyko Karadzhov, Co-Founder and CTO of Payhawk, Bulgaria's first unicorn and one of Europe's fastest-scaling fintechs.
Boyko started as a software engineer at Telerik, one of CEE's biggest tech success stories, before co-founding Payhawk in 2018 with Hristo Borisov. Payhawk hit a $1 billion valuation in under four years, and in 2026 crossed $100 million in ARR to reach Centaur status, a milestone rarer than unicorn status. Over the past two years, Boyko has led a full rebuild of Payhawk's product and engineering organization around autonomous AI agents, while keeping the same full-stack, no-silo engineering culture.
We will dive into what it takes to build and scale engineering at a company that grew to hundreds of engineers, reasons why Payhawk avoids narrow specialization, and what it means to run an AI-native company from the inside. Boyko will share his take on where agentic coding tools currently help and where they still get in the way.
Topics include:
How Payhawk earns the right to move fast with money, and what breaks first when a fintech scales too quickly
Why Payhawk bets on product-domain ownership instead of narrow technical roles, and what that costs
"Be a good host for other engineers" philosophy, and how it holds up as headcount multiplies
What changes in engineering leadership at each stage
What it took to re-architect Payhawk's platform around autonomous agents without breaking trust with enterprise customers
Boyko's take on where agents overreach, and what AI as a multiplier actually multiplies.
Why Boyko insists a technical co-founder should never fully leave the codebase
What he'd tell an engineer becoming a first-time CTO
Building a fintech from Sofia and how to build credibility when your product touches other people's money, and your address is in the Balkans
How did working at Telerik shape his founder journey
Speakers
Boyko Karadzhov Co-Founder & CTO, Payhawk. Boyko spent seven years as a software engineer at Telerik before co-founding Payhawk in 2018. As CTO, he has scaled Payhawk's engineering organization from its earliest days to a full-stack team spanning multiple product domains, and is now leading the company's shift to an AI-native architecture as Payhawk approaches $2 billion in valuation.
Who should attend?
Startup founders and CTOs
Engineers and technical leads
Product managers working on agentic or AI-powered products
Students interested in startups and technology
Event language: English
About organisers:
Garaža is a community of Serbian tech startups created by founders for founders. Garaža connects founders and operators to share experiences and support each other's growth.
Haos Community Space / a community-driven space in Belgrade, bringing together people from technology, entrepreneurship, and the creative industries.