An Engineering Career at SoftInWay Fueled by a Creative Spirit | Vladislava Ivaschenko’s Story

Vladislava Ivaschenko’s journey into engineering didn’t start with dreams of designing turbopumps or compressors. As a kid, she pictured herself as an actress or a singer, spending her time lost in music and drawing.

When she graduated high school, she could have chosen any path, and that’s when she made the deliberate decision to pursue engineering. Almost five years into her time at SoftInWay, it’s clear that her early passion for creativity and self-expression never left her. It had instead shaped an engineering career where that imagination simply found a new outlet.

Figure 1: The early days of Vladislava Ivaschenko

Discovering Her Passion for Engineering

It wasn’t until Vladislava entered university that engineering “completely captivated” her, tracing this shift back to her first substantial engineering project: designing a gearbox.

She found that she absolutely loved the design process, creating technical drawings, making engineering decisions, and understanding the reasoning behind them. More importantly, the project showed her that engineering wasn’t just about applying formulas. It was about weighing performance, reliability, and manufacturability against each other, and finding that balance was exactly what made the work so rewarding.

Vladislava ran with that spark and quickly became one of the top students in her program, a distinction she held for several years, straight through to graduation.

Figure 2: Vladislava receiving the academic excellence award from her university

Joining the SoftInWay Team

Based on her academic performance, her professors recommended her for an internship at SoftInWay. A few months later, that internship turned into a full-time role where she now works as one of SoftInWay’s Aerodynamics Engineers on the Compressor Team.

From that first day, she felt like a new chapter in her life was beginning. “It was going to be something good,” she says.

Finding Her Stage as a Training Instructor

Of all her moments at SoftInWay, the day she was appointed as a training instructor stands out the most.

“It was very scary and nerve-wracking,” she admits, “but at the same time, I saw it as a sign of the company’s trust in me.”

What intimidated her most was having to teach and communicate in English every day, in a language that wasn’t her own. So, she prepared relentlessly, building herself a reference guide, nearly 100 pages long, covering every explanation, note, and instruction she thought she might need.

After a while, she realized she no longer needed to check her notes, and she had a newfound confidence knowing she’d developed a real command of both the material and the craft of teaching itself.

She still keeps that document today, and it’s become a resource she passes on to colleagues taking their own first steps as instructors, the same way she once did.

Figure 3: Vladislava’s 100-page training manual

Engineering Projects that Leave an Impact

Alongside her work as an instructor, Vladislava has worked on a variety of projects, and one of her favorites has been developing turbopumps for a rocket engine with AxSTREAM.

The engine’s design was anything but standard and called for a far more complex arrangement of parts and flow passages than a typical layout, which meant she had to juggle a long list of factors at once. Factors like hydraulic performance, cavitation characteristics, structural integrity, axial and radial hydraulic loads, sealing system design, manufacturability, and packaging/layout constraints. It was the kind of problem that took real creativity and a willingness to make trade-offs on the fly.

“Both creativity and engineering involve imagination, problem-solving, and the ability to look at things from different perspectives,” she explains. Her creative nature, she found, complements her work as an engineer, helping her approach challenges with an open mind.

Figure 4: Integral pump impeller Vladislava built in AxSTREAM

What Keeps Vladislava Moving Forward at SoftInWay

What motivates her every day is the variety of challenges and the people she gets to work alongside. “Our team is made up of talented individuals, each with their own strengths and unique character,” she says, “and that diversity makes working together both enjoyable and inspiring.”

Among that group, one senior colleague has left a lasting impression, sharing a lesson that has always stuck with her which is “dedication and hard work are worth more than talent alone.” It’s a philosophy she’s come to embody, and it shapes how she defines success. For Vladislava, success is defined by the knowledge and experience she gains along the way, and her ability to put it to real use.

When she reflects on her career journey today, she thinks back to the girl who once dreamed of the stage—never imagining she’d one day teach engineers, speak confidently in a language that wasn’t her own, or troubleshoot some of the most unconventional hardware around.

“I think my younger self would be proud of me,” Vladislava says, “and most importantly, would be proud that the consequences of my choices led me to where I am now and made me who I am.”

Figure 5: Vladislava in her home office working at SoftInWay

Stories like Vladislava’s are a reminder that a meaningful engineering career doesn’t always start with a childhood spark for machines. Sometimes it starts with a passion for something else entirely, carried into a new form of expression.

At SoftInWay, legacy lives here.