Location
Moscow, Russia
Backend Engineer
Matvey Sizov
Service mesh, vehicle telemetry, secure APIs | high-load & low-latency | 70K+ RPS, p99 <50 ms
Software engineer working on the backend: distributed systems, production infrastructure, and high-load, low-latency services. 5 years of commercial experience across electric-vehicle telemetry, service mesh, retail pricing, crypto payments, utility billing, and public digital services, with earlier backend work in Java. I own backend work end to end: clarify ambiguous requirements, choose architecture through trade-offs, implement core services, add tests, observability, and security, and ship through CI/CD.
Experience
5 years of backend development
Format
Office, hybrid or remote; Moscow or Saint Petersburg, ready to work from Turkey / open to relocation
Download resume
Professional Experience
Senior Software Engineer
ATOM develops an electric-vehicle platform. In the communications and telemetry team, I build production backend services that keep vehicles securely connected to the cloud, integrate external clients, and support low-latency MQTT, gRPC, and API flows.
- Built a high-load backend service that handles 70K+ requests per second at p99 latency below 50 ms, with headroom to scale beyond current load.
- Independently drove requirements discovery for ambiguous, initially infeasible low-latency vehicle-to-cloud communication: aligned analysts, architects, and integration teams, identified feasible trade-offs, and brought the MVP scope to a documented, build-ready state in Confluence.
- Designed and co-developed an mTLS-secured MQTT broker on Mochi MQTT with certificate-based client authentication, topic-level authorization, and Redis-backed session/state recovery for persistent, restart-safe vehicle-to-cloud communication.
- Reversed the planned architecture on a hard latency budget: a sub-50 ms broker response could not be guaranteed across the originally planned multi-service split, so once the requirements were relaxed I collapsed the design into one low-latency service that meets the budget.
- Made the broker the connection layer between the vehicle fleet and the cloud platform: it balances vehicle connections, keeps the link continuously available, and buffers messages a car produces while it is offline so nothing is lost until connectivity returns.
- Shipped the broker to production in December 2025; it now carries all vehicle-to-cloud traffic, adjacent teams integrate through it, and I stayed on as its technical owner after release.
- Owned the key technical decisions for the broker: stack, hexagonal architecture, service boundaries. Planned and created the team's tasks ahead of time, ran code review, and coordinated directly with adjacent teams and management.
- Built production observability from scratch: metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerts, latency and throughput monitoring. It made the broker the place where cross-team integration defects get localized, and I use its traces to show which side of a service boundary a problem is on.
- After the team lost dedicated DevOps support, took over CI/CD and deployment: build pipelines, manifests/charts, Ansible provisioning, and delivery automation.
- Ran the vehicle-facing services through GitOps: ArgoCD deploys them straight into the cluster from the repository, so the deployed state and the declared state are the same thing.
- Ran the broker on managed Yandex Cloud databases instead of self-hosted ones: PostgreSQL and Redis with automatic scaling. Secrets and access were kept in Vault.
GoMQTTMochi MQTTRedisPostgreSQLApache KafkagRPCREST APIHTTP/HTTPSTLS/SSLmTLSVaultYandex CloudManaged databasesPrometheusGrafanaLokiSentryDockerHelmKubernetesArgoCDGitOpsAnsibleCI/CDBuild pipelines
Middle Software Engineer
Sber Tech develops Platform V, a large enterprise platform. In the Service Mesh & Platform Infrastructure team, I worked on a heavily customized Istio fork and adjacent Kubernetes components for workload control, policy enforcement, and platform integration.
- Took over a component whose verification was almost entirely manual and run by a single QA engineer: restored the automated test suite in a heavily customized Istio fork and raised unit-test coverage to 80%, returning unit tests to daily development.
- Kept the fork current with upstream: merged successive upstream Istio releases into Sber's heavily customized version and repaired the tests that broke on every merge.
- Expanded integration tests to ~95% of critical functionality, moving defect detection before release instead of relying on later manual checks.
- Designed and built a Go integration-testing framework that provisioned isolated Kubernetes environments, ran suites in parallel, and generated Allure reports in CI.
- Spotted an unmet platform need through a product manager and drove it end to end on my own initiative: ran requirements discovery with the DevOps teams that would use it, specified and presented the design, then built and delivered the component solo: a custom Kubernetes resource that makes Istio control-plane/data-plane relationships explicit instead of leaving them to implicit auto-wiring. Its users adopted it, and leadership later presented it as a target platform approach.
- Repaired CI/CD pipelines and moved defect detection earlier in the development cycle for infrastructure changes.
- Mentored ~10 School 21 interns on the framework and automation process, turning manual QA scenarios into scalable automated tests.
GoKubernetesIstioService MeshgRPCREST APIHTTPPostgreSQLVaultCI/CDBuild pipelinesGitLabAllure
Middle Go Backend Engineer
Magnus Tech is a custom software development company. I worked on a pricing-control platform for the Bristol retail chain that unified store data, employee actions, ML pricing recommendations, and photo confirmations into one workflow for operations teams.
- Designed and developed Go backend services from scratch for a pricing platform that combined competitor and online prices, purchase and delivery costs, and per-store data into a recommended price for each item, and tied those recommendations to what store employees actually did on the shelf.
- Owned how the platform's data was modeled, stored, and served: store employees logged and photographed products, an ML model checked the photo confirmations, and my services kept that data consistent and delivered it to the frontend.
- Built REST APIs for admin and internal tools used to review prices, apply manual overrides, compare stores, inspect photo evidence, and coordinate corrective actions.
- Integrated web, email, SMS, and mobile notification flows and kept API contracts stable for frontend and mobile teams; message and notification templates were stored in MongoDB.
- Used ClickHouse for the analytical side of pricing data, keeping heavy reporting reads off the transactional database.
- Covered critical pricing-control flows with backend automated tests around price updates, manual overrides, and data-processing paths.
- Added Prometheus metrics and observability for critical flows and participated in the production launch after active development.
GoPostgreSQLMongoDBClickHouseRedisApache KafkaMinIOREST APIgRPCVaultYandex CloudPrometheusCI/CDClean Architecture
Junior Go Backend Engineer
Exnode develops crypto exchange, B2B payment, and P2P trading products. I worked as part of a larger backend team on transaction flows where payments, exchange operations, and reporting had to stay consistent and fast under real business load.
- Optimized payment and reporting queries with EXPLAIN ANALYZE, cutting several heavy PostgreSQL queries from 10-30 seconds to near real time.
- Split a large monolithic backend into focused services and migrated part of internal communication from REST to gRPC, reducing latency and clarifying service boundaries.
- Investigated and contained a critical currency-conversion incident, rolled back affected transactions, and strengthened validation, observability, and release discipline to reduce recurrence risk.
- Implemented a link-based payment service: API flows that generated and stored payment links, integrated with the frontend payment form, and supported crypto and card payments.
- Built core P2P exchange capabilities: exchange-rate logic, service integrations, email notifications, and Telegram alerts.
- Built the mail-delivery service behind those notifications on MongoDB, keeping queued and sent messages durable independently of the transactional database.
- Worked on the platform API that every Exnode client integrates through, along with the telemetry and reporting flows behind it.
GoPostgreSQLMongoDBRedisRabbitMQREST APIHTTPgRPCVaultAWSGrafanaTelegram Bot API
Junior Go Backend Engineer
Customer portal and internal administrative system for personal accounts, utility billing, payments, and property-management operations.
- Was the only backend developer on the product and built its Go backend independently: accounts, utility billing, payments, dashboards, with 1C and payment integrations and web/mobile clients, under a team lead's technical guidance.
- Rewrote a key PHP service in Go, preserving critical 1C-integration and payment-processing behavior on a more maintainable backend.
GoPHPPostgreSQL1C integrationsPaymentsDashboards
Center for Regional Management of Lipetsk Oblast (CUR)
Intern Java Developer
Public-sector digital services: self-employment registration workflows and emergency-call analytics with map-based views.
- Built Java backend services and SQL-backed business logic for public-sector products (self-employment registration, emergency-call tracking and analytics).
JavaSQLBackend
Education
Formal education and current degree track.
B.S. in Intelligent Automated Systems (part-time)
Vocational diploma in Information Technology and Programming
Professional Profile
Patterns that best describe my engineering style and career direction.
Architecture through trade-offs
I make architectural decisions through concrete trade-offs: latency, reliability, operational complexity, team capacity, and future change cost. I am comfortable choosing between Redis and PostgreSQL, gRPC and REST, or a broker-centered design and a broader microservice split.
Product + infrastructure
I have built both platform infrastructure and product backends: service mesh components, testing infrastructure, vehicle telemetry, retail pricing, crypto payments, utility billing, and administrative systems. This range helps me translate product needs into reliable service boundaries and production infrastructure.
Mentoring and technical leadership
I mentor interns and engineers, explain system design and backend fundamentals, and turn feedback into concrete growth plans. I want my path toward technical leadership to stay grounded in hands-on engineering.
Self-taught from primary sources
I have been programming since I was 14 and working commercially since 18, and I learned all of it myself from primary sources rather than packaged courses: language specifications and the books written by the language authors. Each language I take up ends in something that ships. I picked Go over Kotlin, learned it, and was working in it commercially within the year.
Fast ramp-up across stacks
I ramp up quickly in unfamiliar domains and technologies: Go, Kubernetes/Istio, MQTT, service mesh, crypto payments, retail systems, and vehicle telemetry. I use AI tools pragmatically for research, routine implementation, tests, and refactoring, while keeping architecture and production-risk decisions under my own review.
Technical Skills
Programming Languages
Go (Golang)JavaKotlinPythonRustSQLJavaScript / HTML / CSS
APIs & Messaging
gRPCREST APIHTTP/HTTPSMQTTWebRTCRTP/RTCPWebSocketApache KafkaRabbitMQNATS
Data & Storage
PostgreSQLMySQLRedisMinIOClickHouseMongoDB
Platform & Delivery
DockerKubernetesHelmIstioService MeshArgoCDGitOpsAWSGCPYandex CloudManaged databasesInfrastructure as CodeAnsibleGitLabCI/CDBuild pipelinesNginxLinuxGit
Security & Identity
mTLSTLS/SSLCertificate-based authenticationSecrets managementVault (HashiCorp)Identity managementKeycloakActive Directory
Observability & Quality
PrometheusGrafanaLokiSentryAllureUnit/integration testingPerformance profiling (pprof)Query optimizationCode review
Core areas
Distributed systemsBackend architectureClean ArchitectureHexagonal ArchitectureAlgorithms and data structuresTechnical decision-makingData reconciliation and reportingHigh-load and low-latency servicesService MeshPlatform engineeringCloud-native infrastructureTesting infrastructureObservabilityService reliabilityProduction deliveryFast technology ramp-upAI-assisted developmentMentoring
Spoken languages
Russian (Native)English (B2 / Working proficiency)
Additional Information
- I'm open to growing along either a tech-lead or an architecture track and prefer to let the team's needs decide the exact role, staying grounded in hands-on engineering either way.
- I'm equally glad to deepen infrastructure, my focus for the last ~2 years at Sber Tech and ATOM, or to take on a new domain such as fintech, and I ramp up quickly in unfamiliar areas.
- For roles that require working outside Russia, I am ready to work from Turkey: I have family there, so relocating my working base is straightforward. I am equally open to relocation packages elsewhere.
- Among new domains, backend infrastructure around LLM platforms interests me most: the Go services, pipelines, integrations, and quality tooling that make model-based products reliable in production. These are engineering problems I already solve, applied to a fast-moving area.
- Outside delivery work I keep deepening fundamentals and breadth: engineering books on distributed systems and clean architecture (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, Clean Code), and new languages studied the same way, from their reference books. I went through Python in depth and worked through Rust book in hand.
- I also build side projects to go deeper than delivery work allows: in Go, where I worked hands-on with WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, and video codecs, and in Python and Rust.
- Outside work I keep a disciplined, healthy routine: running, gym, swimming, and cycling. I also travel, with Japan high on my list to revisit.