Career highlights

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  Bir ecosystem

  Head of Software Engineering · Apr 2026 – Present

  The Caucasus' first fully integrated banking, payments and e-commerce ecosystem — Kapital Bank's digital business. Launched in 2025, it brings together leading platforms across banking, payments, cash-to-digital infrastructure and online retail.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Leading the engineering organisation: 100+ people — developers, QA engineers and analysts — organised around three product tribes.
  • Org design and hiring across engineering, QA and analysis; delivery is owned by the tribes — I own the organisation that makes it possible.
  • Engineering standards, practices and quality gates as a company-wide system.
  • Chapter model: growing chapter leads as multipliers of engineering capability.

  
  

  Role: Head of Software Engineering · Apr 2026 – Present (promoted from Director of QA CoE)

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Designed and rolled out a guild model across 500+ engineers (Backend, Web, QA, iOS, Android, DevOps/SRE, ITBA, AI) — overlapping initiatives now surface early; I run the QA guild.
  • Capability programmes — Tech Mastery: 40+ engineers trained and certified.

  
  

  Previous role: Director of QA CoE · Jul 2024 – Apr 2026

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Built a 100+ person QA organisation and Quality Center of Excellence from scratch: structure, roles, governance model and scalable operating processes.
  • Designed a QA centralisation model (Strong / Mild / Weak CoE) separating responsibilities between the central CoE and product teams.
  • Introduced company-wide Quality Gates and Zero Bug Policy — critical production incidents down 50%+.
  • Scaled test automation from 0% to 40% of the core regression suite; established SDET and Performance Testing teams.
  • Defined 10+ quality and efficiency metrics for data-driven reporting (Tableau, Jira).
  • Developed a 2-year QA strategy with full budget ownership; KPI and OKR frameworks aligned with business goals.

  
  

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  SberDevices

  QA Team Lead · Jul 2023 – Jul 2024

  A key tech company within the Sber ecosystem — AI-powered smart devices and platforms: voice assistants, AR/VR and LLMs, with 40+ million users across services.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Led QA across multiple cross-functional squads in the Sber ecosystem.
  • Built the testing process from scratch in one of the teams.
  • Introduced shift-left testing across the delivery process.

  
  

  Role: QA Team Lead · Jul 2023 – Jul 2024

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Reduced the Zero Bug Policy backlog by 86% — historically the best result for the company's highest-load team.
  • Grew automation engineering headcount 1.5x (6 to 9 engineers) with no regression in time-to-market or quality.
  • Improved quality of external products by integrating QA processes that had not existed before; improved testing metrics for better transparency.

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  RoboFinance

  Head of QA · Mar 2022 – Jul 2023

  Digital startup building a fintech and e-commerce ecosystem in the Philippines. UnaBank — the first app-based bank in the country — is a business unit of RoboCash Group.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Managed multiple teams: 12 people in total (3 automation + 9 manual) across 6 teams.
  • Organised testing processes both from scratch and on top of existing ones.
  • Created the test strategy and test plans.

  
  

  Role: Head of QA · Mar 2022 – Jul 2023

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Drove test automation to 70% coverage of the main services.
  • Implemented load testing (JMeter + Grafana).
  • Built a strong testing team that kept quality stable through rapid product growth.

  
  

  Stack: Java + RestAssured, Charles, Postman

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  Skillbox

  QA Course Developer & Mentor · Sep 2022 – Aug 2025 · Part-time

  Skillbox — one of the largest online education platforms in the CIS, focused on in-demand digital professions.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Improving and extending Skillbox's testing courses.
  • Training student cohorts and providing mentorship.
  • Participating in the organisation of the IT experts club.

  
  

  Role: QA Course Developer, Mentor & Expert · Sep 2022 – Aug 2025 · Part-time

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Developed and supervised a new QA course end to end.
  • Ran masterclasses, spoke at conferences and wrote articles for the Skillbox brand.

  
  

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  Hedera

  QA Automation Consultant · 2020 – 2022 · Part-time

  Enterprise-grade public distributed ledger governed by independent global organisations — enterprises, web3 projects and leading universities.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Test automation strategy for decentralised services.
  • Embedding Cypress pipelines into CI/CD for continuous delivery confidence.
  • Mentoring engineers on test automation and quality reporting.

  
  

  Role: QA Automation Consultant · 2020 – 2022 · Part-time

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Launched Hedera’s JavaScript/Cypress automation programme from the ground up.
  • Built modular end-to-end test frameworks for decentralised services.
  • Established regression suites guarding consensus services.

  
  

  Stack: JavaScript + Cypress

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  VK (Mail.ru Group)

  QA Lead · Apr 2021 – Mar 2022

  CityMobil — one of Russia's two largest ride-hailing platforms and a VK business unit. I worked on platform services.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Embedding QA into the Scrum delivery process.
  • Hiring and building the QA team from scratch.
  • Autotest review, mentoring and growing the company-wide QA community.

  
  

  Role: QA Lead · Apr 2021 – Mar 2022

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Achieved 60% API coverage with a Kotlin automation framework built from scratch.
  • Load testing surfaced the bottlenecks whose fixes increased platform service throughput by 35%.
  • Coached engineers from junior to mid level; spoke at internal engineering conferences.

  
  

  Stack: Vegeta, GHZ, Kotlin (API tests), YAML, Charles, Postman

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  Yandex

  SDET · Apr 2020 – Apr 2021

  One of Europe's largest technology companies. Project: Partner Code — an ad display platform.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Implementing the automated testing process and integrating it into Agile delivery workflows.
  • YAML-based test documentation management.
  • Driving adoption of developer-written test cases and autotests.

  
  

  Role: SDET · Apr 2020 – Apr 2021

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Test scenario creation sped up ~40% after developers started writing YAML cases and autotests.
  • Reduced defect count by 25% via Zero Bug Policy.
  • Rolled out Hermione.js visual regression testing to protect UI fidelity at scale.

  
  

  Stack: JavaScript, WebDriverIO, Hermione.js, YAML, Charles, Postman

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  BORK

  QA Lead · Jan 2017 – Apr 2020

  BORK — international premium home-appliance brand. I worked across all projects of the BORK & Technopark holding (~3,000 employees).

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Implementing the testing process in a two-week Scrum delivery cycle.
  • Hiring the QA team from scratch and setting up the automation environment: tooling selection and configuration.
  • In parallel (2019 – 2020) worked as a Frontend Engineer on BORK projects: the new BORK website, Technopark landing pages and the holding's StoryBook.

  
  

  Role: QA Lead · Jan 2017 – Apr 2020

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Built the QA function from scratch: hired and grew the team to 6 engineers.
  • Mentored 6 engineers from junior to mid/senior level.
  • Achieved ~90% automation coverage for the BORK project.

  
  

  Stack: Codeception, Selenium, Allure, JavaScript, Jira, Confluence

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  Dyson

  Frontend Engineer · 2019 – 2020 · Part-time project

  Dyson — British technology company designing premium home appliances, with customers in over 100 countries worldwide.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Responsive UI across Dyson’s global storefronts.
  • Partnering with backend squads to streamline API integrations.

  
  

  Role: Frontend Engineer · 2019 – 2020 · Part-time project

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Sped up delivery with React and Vue component libraries.
  • Optimised web vitals for product launch campaigns.

  
  

  Stack: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Vue.js, Figma, Sketch

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  TechnoPark

  QA Lead · Jan 2017 – Apr 2020

  TechnoPark — one of Russia's largest consumer electronics retailers, the first and only publicly traded company in its market sector. Part of the BORK & Technopark holding.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • QA strategy for TechnoPark’s omnichannel retail relaunch.
  • Cross-team quality councils and executive-level QA reporting.
  • Autotest review and mentoring.

  
  

  Role: QA Lead · Jan 2017 – Apr 2020

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Achieved ~50% automation coverage using Codeception, Selenium and Allure.
  • Made quality measurable for the leadership team through regular executive reporting.

  
  

  Stack: PHP, Codeception, Selenium, Allure, JavaScript, Jira, Confluence

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  Technoserv — SberTech

  QA Engineer · Feb 2016 – Jan 2017

  Technoserv — one of Russia's largest system integrators (~5,000 employees). Manual QA of SberTech banking projects for the Sberbank Group.

  
  

  Focus areas:

  • Manual testing of SberTech banking platforms.
  • Collaboration with the development team to reproduce and isolate defects.

  
  

  Role: QA Engineer · Feb 2016 – Jan 2017

  
  

  Achievements:

  • Designed and executed test scenarios in HP ALM.
  • Prepared acceptance checklists and testing reports; maintained the defect base in Jira.

  
  

  Stack: SeleniumIDE, HP ALM, Jira