I am an enthusiastic and creative software engineer experienced in building continuously deployed large scale distributed web applications with high demands for security and performance, developing APIs and microservices and engineering data pipelines. I am passionate about JavaScript, learning new languages and frameworks and constantly improving the quality of the code base. I thrive in a lean agile environment.
After completing a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, and spending some years in Investment Banking and then Arts, I came back to tech through Makers Academy, where I grasped thorough knowledge of the best practices, Test Driven Development, pair programming and good taste for code. For the last 3.5 years I’ve been gaining misc software engineering experience in various teams of the Financial Times, working on the award-winning website and one of the fastest news sites in the world.
Skills | Experience | Tech-related Projects | Education | Interests |
Software Skills.
- JavaScript, Preact, React, Redux, Typescript, CSS/Scss, Mustache, Handlebars, Origami
- node.js, Express, Typescript, PHP, Python, Heroku, Docker
- AWS: Lambda, Kinesis, SQS, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, Aurora, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, IAM
- Neo4j, ElasticSearch, Firebase, PostgreSQL, Redis, BigQuery
- Webpack, CircleCI, Pingdom, Graphite, Grafana, Git, Slack integration
- Jest, Enzyme, Testing Library, BrowserStack, Mocha, Sinon, Chai
- Android (Java, Kotlin), iOS (Swift)
- Studied in University: C, C++, Visual C, Pascal, Assembler, Matlab and R
Analytical skills. Graduated from one of the best math high schools in Moscow, and then from applied math faculty of Moscow State University, that is proven to provide one of the strongest math education in the world.
Learner. Love to learn, and to find the most efficient and fast solutions. Am very quick in analysing and understanding completely new concepts, and am a knowledge worker.
Creativity. Participated on all creative development levels in misc art-related projects.
Problem solving and perseverance. Am a problem solver, and usually do not stop until I can find the best possible solution. Don't believe in the word "impossible".
Attention to detail. Investment banking has an extensive training and continuous focus on development and maintaining an extraordinary attention to details.
Project management and organisational skills. Obtained extensive project management experience from managing multi-billion transactions during my banking career, up to management and organisation of disorganised artists.
Communication skills and emotional intelligence. Demonstrated ability to communicate and manage people with completely different backgrounds, from artists to bankers. Successfully built communication bridges between artists and developers. Organising networking events for cross-cultural collaboration (7 of Clubs).
Human Languages.
- Russian (mother tongue)
- English (full professional proficiency)
(Apr 2017 - now) Full Stack - Senior Software Engineer
FT Apps - Financial Times' mobile application
- Being a 10 years old codebase, the apps have lots of legacy code and tech debt. Katerina initiated, negotiated with the product and took leadership over the tech debt initiative whose goal is to improve maintainability, reliability of the codebase and developer experience. The initiative resulted in tackling > 20 major tech debt issues, including breaches in security, replacing with the appropriate alternatives or rebuilding dependencies on non-maintained packages, migrating components to preact, and 4x increase in test coverage.
- Additionally, as part of general team responsibilities, Katerina maintained old and developed new components and features for the app (a JavaScript web-app partially migrated to preact, with iOSand Android wrappers, PHP API layer, using Jenkins, AWS lambdas, Firebase etc.).
Scout Asia - subscription service delivering news and financial overviews Asian companies (JV start-up by FT and Nikkei)
- ScoutAsia relies on the data pipeline to provide accurate and timely insights to users, and its performance was starting to affect the quality of the experience. Katerina investigated the source of these issues and implemented a parallelisation solution that significantly reduced pipeline time.
- Addressing a business need to add information about key employees, Katerina took part in architecting a new “peoples” ETL data pipeline.
- In addition, Katerina maintained React/Redux/Typescript frontends and improved their Webpack and Circle CI configurations.
MyFT - personalised ft.com
- The MyFT Daily Digest emails were all sent at the same hour, which created a disproportionate load to all systems. Katerina architected a personalisation mechanism that was adjusting send times based on when the user usually opens the email. While doing that Katerina improved the running time of the Daily Digest pipeline from 36 hours to c.20 minutes.
- Katerina created a Python API layer for a Machine Learning initiative that was exploring personalisation of topics recommended to users.
B2B Enterprise Tools - a platform for the Financial Times' corporate clients
- Created, deployed and incorporated into ft.com micro-services system a suite of applications allowing corporate FT clients to manage their content licenses.
- Developed 2/5 core apps for the service with server-side rendered React and core experience.
- Built a pipeline optimising the breakdown of the license usage per user for further analytics.
Other
- Actively participated in recruitment and hiring, including acting as a hiring manager for ScoutAsia (with two successful hires), leading both technical and soft skills interviews.
- Created roles.ft.com. Advocated for the FT at career fairs and conferences.
- Winner of the prize for the best reader engagement idea at FT hackathon.
- Line manager.
ING (London) (Sep 2011 - Dec 2014)
Corporate Finance Department, Associate
- Involved in a range of financial deals, which included sell-side, buy-side, strategic and financial advisories.
Credit Suisse (London) (Jul 2009 - Sep 2011, Summer 2008)
Investment Banking Department, TMT Group, Intern and Analyst
- Involved in various transactions, including buy-side, sell-side of M&A, debt and refinancing advisory, restructuring, rating advisory, IPOs and IPO advisories; and monitoring of the Technology, Media & Telecoms sectors worldwide.
Luxoft (Moscow) (Dec 2007 - May 2008)
Deutsche Bank Department, Quality Assurance Specialist
- Worked on the development of the intranet software for Deutsche Bank.
A multi-sensory, participatory generative art installation; visual-musical instrument that responds to touch with sound and light patterns; created by a team of London-based professionals, where Katerina is a leader and a JavaScript dev.
- JavaScript, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Python
- The project was showcased internationally and received funding from several Burning Man community events.
- Katerina gave a technical conference talk on the topic (at DevFest Siberia, in November 2019).
The Product and Tech recruitment microsite for prospective candidates to learn about the FT's culture and apply for current or future vacancies, roles.ft.com
- A very simple HTML/CSS website hosted on Netlify (that provides backend for the contact form).
- The challenge was to try not to use JavaScript at all. It almost worked - the only time the JavaScript is used is to check the size of the uploaded CV.
The idea was to build a very simple website in a way so that the artist herself with no coding knowledge at all could change the descriptions and add new projects. There was a need to address artists requirements for a very unique design, that would represent artistic soul and a vision of their portfolio.
- After some consideration I decided to show the artist products of vis.js React library. She really liked the idea of interconnected nodes.
- Created a JSON based very basic CMS and explained the artist how to apply change to the JSON files on GitHub.
Makers Academy (Nov 2016 to Mar 2017)
Web Development Immersive
- Teaches how to learn, grasp new technologies, and how to apply best coding practices to real-life full circle application creation
- Knowledge of concepts such as OOP, TDD, SOLID, MVC and DDD
- Software Craftsmanship
- Environment: Terminal, Git, Github
- Languages and frameworks: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, PostgreSQL, Javascript, Node.js (React)
- Testing: Rspec, Jasmine, Mocha, Chai
Open Design School (Dec 2014 to May 2015)
- Introduction to Graphic Design: Introduction to Graphic Design and its history; Adobe products: Illustartor, InDesign and Photoshop
- Web Design for Graphic Designers: Basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Web Development Workflow
Lomonosov Moscow State University (2003 to 2008)
Dept. of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
- Areas of focus: Optimal Control Theory, Financial Mathematics, Mathematical Methods in Economics, Statistical Analysis, Methods of Optimisation, Risk Theory and Quantitative Financial Models.
- Studied programming languages C, C++, Visual C, Pascal, Assembler, Matlab and R, and the theory of numerical analysis, algorithms and code developing.
Completed a number of online development courses (TreeHouse: iOS dev, Swift, HTML, CSS, PhP and JavaScript; CodeAcademy; Coursera (Big Date and R))
Art. Passionate about art on the intersection of art and technology, and interconnection between art and mathematics. Very interested in art in general, history of art, Bauhaus, modernism and Russian avant-garde.
Light. Passionate about lights and LEDs. In spare time create participatory LED installations for festivals.
Technology. Looking forward to technology bifurcation. Therefore following news about AI (and machine learning) and VR.
Philosophy. Solipsism, philosophy of religion and Asian philosophical traditions. Foucault, Zizek.
Yoga, Meditation and Hiking.
Generally curious about everything interesting. Love to find out what other people do, and get broad understanding of the wide scope of reality.
Seven Of Clubs (Dec 2015 - current)
Proud co-founder, working on organisation and management, PR, design and website creation and coordination.
- Platform allowing great people to share their specialist knowledge and encouraging collaboration between professionals throughout multiple disciplines.
Analema Group (Dec 2015 - current)
Organisation, management, PR and marketing, as well as managing finance and dealing with funding matters.
- Analema Group is a London based Europe-wide arts collective, a group of artists, researchers, programmers and sound designers. Analema Group aims to create new experiences on the intersection between art and technology.