Meet Olesia Suprunenko, COO Ukraine at GFE Solutions — and one of those rare people who was there before the company had a shape, and helped give it one.

She studied at the National Transport University, but what defines her professionally is less the diploma and more the decade-plus of experience building something from the ground up. From the very beginning, Olesia has been the person who keeps the operation coherent — connecting the technical side of the business with the human side, making sure the right people are on board and that the work actually gets done. In a company that lives or dies by the quality of its engineers, finding people who are both technically sharp and genuinely easy to work with is not a small task. It is something she has gotten very good at.

Outside of work, she is into floristics and landscape design, which her colleagues probably find either surprising or completely predictable depending on how well they know her. She also does yoga, which — given everything her job involves — seems less like a hobby and more like a reasonable survival strategy.