Salute! πŸ‘‹

My name is Denis. I am an Engineering Manager with a backend background in Python and Go. I love doing optimizations: diving deep into a problem and looking for solutions.

I am very interested in high-load distributed systems. I believe that a long-living project requires good test coverage and possibly ugly but strict code style. And MVP is MVP.

These days I spend as much time on the team as on the code: building development processes, people management, goal setting and keeping engineers motivated. I share that experience here alongside the technical writing.

Love open source and studying programming languages development.

I am self-taught and have no computer science education, but before entering IT, I had some entrepreneurial and leadership experience, so I am well aware of how to prioritize business requirements and a technical debt.

Experience

Engineering Manager, Safety team – inDrive, Tbilisi / Remote (November 2025 – present)

I lead a team of Android, iOS, backend and QA engineers distributed across 4 countries. We build worldwide distributed systems in Kotlin, Swift and Go that make inDrive a safer place for our customers.

Management Distributed systems Go Kotlin Swift

Senior backend engineer, acting as Tech Lead – Avito, Tbilisi / Remote (March 2024 – November 2025)

Anti-fraud team at Avito, the world’s largest online classifieds platform. I developed architecture and platform solutions, launched new services and improved system performance, while leading the team and managing processes.

  • Clustering & multi-account services. Designed and implemented a scalable clustering architecture with sharding and data migration: resource usage dropped ~2.5x (630 GB Redis β†’ 250 GB MongoDB + 12 GB KeyDB), with better stability and SLO compliance. Designed and launched the multi-account management MVP, decomposed the work and led the team to a fast production release.
  • Platform improvements. Implemented a shared caching library; extended other libraries with deadline propagation, context logging and assorted optimizations.
  • Reliability & performance. Optimized Python services, introduced caching and data compression, removed bottlenecks and ran load testing to verify behaviour under high load.
  • Delivery management. Formalized technical project workflows, maintained roadmaps and Jira dashboards β€” the team completed 90%+ of planned tasks.
  • Team growth. Mentored developers, conducted interviews, improved the system design evaluation process and acted as feature lead on key initiatives.
  • Community. Relaunched the internal Python community and organized meetups, increasing engineer engagement by 175%.
  • Incidents & technical debt. Systematized incident and bug review, slowing the accumulation of technical debt.

Python Go Distributed systems MongoDB Redis KeyDB Kafka Pulsar Kubernetes

Backend team lead – ITASystems (1CUPIS project), Moscow / Remote (February 2023 – March 2024)

1CUPIS is the only payment system for Russian legal bookmakers. I led a team of 10 people β€” developers, QA engineers and a system analyst β€” building the anti-fraud system and several related services.

  • made anti-fraud one of the best performing nodes of the whole payment system, improving its performance by 7x despite constantly growing business logic
  • introduced approaches that help the team safely deliver features to a distributed system, reducing unsuccessful releases to a minimum
  • arranged sharing of competencies through internal technical discussions, reducing the bus factor
  • streamlined and systematised how the team maintains technical documentation

Alongside that: team assessment and metrics, 1:1s and feedback, architectural solutions and contract negotiation, hiring and interviewing, planning and estimation, development and CI/CD process improvements, code review β€” and coding (when it’s possible πŸ˜€).

Management Kanban Python Django Flask PostgreSQL MongoDB Kafka RabbitMQ Docker Kubernetes

Software engineer – ITASystems (1CUPIS project), Moscow (June 2021 – January 2023)

I was responsible for the anti-fraud system, every service in its infrastructure, and for automating the business unit’s operations.

  • improved the services’ performance and stability by several times
  • set up monitoring and alerting that lets the team spot and address issues early
  • integrated the system with incident control and government services, which significantly reduced manual work for colleagues

Optimization Python Django Flask PostgreSQL MongoDB Kafka RabbitMQ Docker Kubernetes Jaeger Kibana

Software engineer – Printum, Moscow (December 2020 – June 2021)

I developed backend and frontend for SaaS, an embedded product, and a small mobile application.

Of the non-trivial things I had to do:

  • an integration with ActiveDirectory (users sync)
  • an embedded application for Xerox MFPs

Since the team was small, I took on some more unusual functions, such as:

  • working with customers: deploying embedded software in their infrastructure, preparing for a presentation, consulting administrators
  • working with outsourcing teams
  • product delivery automation: packaging, uploading to S3, installation from S3 to the customer’s local network
  • publishing of a mobile application to Google Play and AppStore.

Python Django DRF PostgreSQL Docker Nginx Vue.js jQuery LDAP SNMP Ansible Bash

Test automation engineer – Tensor, Novosibirsk (December 2019 – November 2020)

I was engaged in the automation of UI and API testing of the warehouse accounting system.

In addition to the tests themselves, I developed elements of the company’s testing framework, and also set up CI in Jenkins: built pipelines for various types of tests (smoke, acceptance, integration), wrote Groovy scripts to update the test environment.

Python Selenium Jenkins Groovy Docker Linux Page object

Junior Python developer – E-commerce, self-employed, Novosibirsk (June 2018 – November 2019)

I built a back-office system for my own e-commerce business with Python, Flask and PostgreSQL.

  • automated price list collection from suppliers’ websites
  • integrated with external marketplaces (Drom.ru, Auto.ru)
  • implemented tools to find optimal prices across overlapping items

I also ran the business end to end: supplier relations, marketing, SEO, customer service, sales, logistics and accounting. This is what led me to IT.

Python Flask PostgreSQL Problem solving Liquid InSales Yandex Direct

Before IT

Company commander, senior engineer – The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Novosibirsk (July 2012 – June 2018)

Commanded a company and organized machines operation in conditions of persistent multiprocessing.

Management Planning Multitasking

Education

Higher, specialist degree – The Land Forces academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Omsk (2007 – 2012) Engineer, automobiles and their maintenance

Additional to higher – The Land Forces academy of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Omsk (2010 – 2012) Translator in the sphere of professional communication (English)