Hi, I’m Aleksandr, a Lead Solution Architect designing mission-critical fintech and data platforms at scale.

Greenfield builds, legacy monoliths, vendor platforms: from requirements to production

16years: in software engineering

11years: as architect and technical lead

99.99%: availability of platforms I architected,
across 3 data centres

~70people: in 5 teams building the platform
I co-architect

About

I design distributed systems, own the full engineering lifecycle, stay hands-on with PoCs and research, and use AI across the SDLC. Outside work, I mentor engineers (500+ one-to-one sessions since 2024), write about system design and have co-authored a Java developer course (opens in a new tab).

Experience

Architecture and technical leadershipEngineeringSystems administration

Sep 2024 - Present

Lead Solution Architect

GITMAX IT Services, Budapest (remote from Spain)

Bank-wide real-time pricing and billing platform for a top-tier universal bank: ~40 microservices, 99.99% availability, 3 data centres. One of two architects, covering 3 in-house teams and overseeing 2 vendor teams
Feb 2024 - Aug 2024

Independent Solution Architect

Self-employed, Montenegro

Offline-first media delivery platform for a railway operator: tens of TB of content replicated to onboard train servers. The product’s first architect, in a 12-person team with no technical lead
Apr 2019 - Jan 2024

Principal Solution Architect & Technical Lead

Sberbank, Moscow

Federated data-access platform for a 175+ PB data estate: 100 GB/s peaks, 99.99% availability. Proposed the architecture, wrote the MVP and owned the platform end to end as technical lead of a 14-engineer team
Apr 2018 - Apr 2019

Lead Java Developer

Ingram Micro Cloud (now CloudBlue), Moscow

B2B cloud-commerce platform for 200+ marketplaces in 45+ countries, built on a Java/C++ monolith being decomposed into microservices. Technical lead of the 7-engineer team that extracted user and account management into one of the first microservices
Jun 2014 - Apr 2018

Lead Solution Architect (promoted from Senior Java Developer)

SberTech, Moscow

Credit risk assessment platform automating decisions for nearly all of Sberbank’s lending: up to 80k applications a day. Grew it from a 3-engineer service as lead architect and technical lead, working through 4 team leads (25 engineers)
Nov 2011 - May 2014

Java Developer

Neoflex, Moscow

Credit origination platforms for 4 banks, built on the Neoflex FrontOffice product: mortgage, car and consumer lending. Developer across backend, workflows and integrations; stood in for the team lead on production rollouts
Sep 2010 - Oct 2011

Junior Java Developer

Akzia.Apps, Moscow

4 cross-platform consumer mobile apps, including an XMPP-based messenger: one backend per app for iOS, Android and Java ME clients. Backend developer in a 5-engineer team, owning the server side of all four
Mar 2008 - Jun 2010

Unix System Administrator

Media Mir (RBC media group), Moscow

Server estate behind the group’s consumer internet services (QIP, Smotri.com, LovePlanet): ~400 FreeBSD and Linux servers, millions of users. System administrator in a 6-engineer operations team on a 24/7 rota

Education

2005 - 2011

Bauman Moscow State Technical University

Specialist degree (Master’s level), Computer-Aided Design Systems

Writing

Relational Databases (Part 1) (opens in a new tab)

Design strategies, ER notations, design patterns from normalisation to versioning, plus replication, sharding and federation

HackerNoon · 29 Feb 2024System Design Cheat Sheet
Cache (opens in a new tab)

Types of caching, five read and write strategies, eviction and invalidation, and popular solutions

HackerNoon · 30 Jan 2024System Design Cheat Sheet
Message Queues: ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, ZeroMQ (opens in a new tab)

Messaging models and exchanges, the main protocols and APIs (AMQP, MQTT, JMS, STOMP) and how four brokers compare

HackerNoon · 20 Dec 2023System Design Cheat Sheet
API Styles: REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, Webhook, RPC/gRPC, SOAP (opens in a new tab)

Six API styles side by side: key concepts, use cases and an example of each

HackerNoon · 24 Oct 2023System Design Cheat Sheet
Networks (opens in a new tab)

Network types and topologies, common protocols, the OSI and TCP/IP models and network security basics

HackerNoon · 29 Sep 2023System Design Cheat Sheet
Load Balancer, Reverse Proxy, Forward Proxy, API Gateway (opens in a new tab)

What each of the four does, how they differ, global and local load balancing and the common algorithms

HackerNoon · 30 Aug 2023System Design Cheat Sheet