Meet Vladyslav Zhabin, CAD Team Lead at GFE Solutions — an engineer who built his foundation in a part of Ukraine where heavy industry is not a background detail but the whole story.

He studied mechanical engineering in Kramatorsk, focusing on mining, forging and pressing equipment — the kind of specialisation that puts you face to face with machines that weigh more than most buildings. What is less obvious, but equally telling, is that he also completed a second degree in Business Economics at the same institution. For an engineer, that choice says something: it means he was already thinking beyond the drawing, already curious about the broader context in which technical decisions play out.

Before joining GFE Solutions, Vladyslav spent years as a Design Engineer at NKMZ — Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant, one of the most significant heavy machinery manufacturers in Eastern Europe. He worked across two departments there: first in forging and pressing equipment, then in lifting and transport machinery, including metallurgical cranes built for some of the harshest operating conditions imaginable. Working on projects of that scale changes how you think about design — you stop seeing drawings as documents and start seeing them as commitments, because somewhere down the line, those lines on a screen become tonnes of steel in motion.

That is the perspective Vladyslav brings to his role every day. As CAD Team Lead, he knows what is at stake when a design decision is made carelessly, and that awareness is worth more than any software certification.

Outside of work, he has been playing basketball since school and has never really stopped, filling the rest of his free time with cycling and table tennis — an active counterbalance to hours spent in front of a screen.