Alex Abashev
Verified Expert in Engineering
Java Developer
Yerevan, Armenia
Toptal member since October 17, 2012
Alex is a talented Java architect with over 20 years of experience developing scalable, high-load systems. He is a highly competent team lead and skilled at setting up entire development environments in accordance with best practices. Alexey adheres to unit testing, code reviews, continuous integration, and auto-deployment on the cloud or using dedicated hardware.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 20 years
- Continuous Integration (CI) - 20 years
- Technical Leadership - 15 years
- Java - 15 years
- Docker - 10 years
- Requirements Analysis - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 10 years
- Spring - 10 years
Preferred Environment
Git, IDEA IDE, Linux, MacOS, WhatsApp, Team Management
The most amazing...
...thing I've done is give the keynote presentation at a developers' conference.
Work Experience
Java Back-end Developer Lead
Endeavor - Streaming DBA Dice Technology
- Designed and implemented a modular templating system for all client-facing UIs, conducting performance testing and managing an incremental rollout across production environments.
- Optimized the development cycle by adopting industry-standard tooling and trunk-based development best practices, reducing integration overhead and improving deployment consistency.
- Championed AI adoption across the engineering team, integrating AI-assisted tools and workflows into all internal services and establishing them as a standard part of the development process.
Architect
Top-100 Global Bank
- Designed and implemented a multi-agent orchestration system from scratch using Spring AI and LangGraph4j, processing tens of thousands of incoming claims per week through a supervisor-routed pipeline of specialized sub-agents.
- Architected a context management layer using chat history stored in the database and injected into each prompt, enabling continuity across multi-turn interactions and significantly improving response relevance.
- Built structured output handling and confidence-based fallback logic, ensuring low-confidence or out-of-scope responses were flagged for human review rather than passed to end users.
- Implemented full compliance audit logging across the pipeline, meeting the regulatory requirements of a top-100 global bank and providing complete traceability for every AI-generated response.
- Resolved critical production failure modes, including prompt drift across long contexts, inconsistent structured outputs under edge cases, and latency spikes from synchronous LLM call chains — delivering a stable, production-ready system.
Architect
A Company Managing Logistic Services for SMB
- Moved a lot of background processing tasks to AWS Lambda and Step Functions as part of the refactoring process, saving 70% of our cloud bills.
- Handled setting up the dashboard for stakeholders with business metrics, ETL, and data storage behind.
- Served as a team lead in charge of building the development process from scratch, with QA environments and full CI usage for every part—from managing issues to security checks, rollouts, etc.
- Implemented a platform for integrating various APIs (Shopify, Amazon Marketplace, WooCommerce, etc) into one processing flow.
VP of Engineering
Company in the Mobile Entertainment Market
- Hired and built up the back-end development team with an agile development cycle, from coding conventions to CI/CD.
- Implemented a microservices architecture with hundreds of servers spread between three AWS regions and multiple time zones.
- Planned and deployed business services at AWS China.
- Iterated on our deployment scheme, from custom shell scripts through Ansible and Packer to Terraform and ECS.
- Implemented a lot of tools for managing environments like the admin API for the service, Amazon ECS and Amazon S3 resources, Datadog monitoring, or PagerDuty monitoring.
- Integrated a few monitoring systems for our applications and infrastructure, like Zabbix, NewRelic, and Datadog.
- Designed and implemented a back-end service for instant messaging between mobile and web users. As a transport layer, I used WebSockets with a highly modified OpenFire XMPP server.
- Designed and implemented push notifications for mobile and web users. It was a mix of custom client code for Apple/Google API, AWS push notification service, and custom Redis queues.
Performance Architect
Software Vendor in the Aerospace Industry
- Refactored a custom Swing application to render aircraft models with airflows. Instead of one FPS with keyboard manipulation, I was able to make all calculations in run-time with 40 FPS.
- Built up the whole development cycle with GitHub as source hosting, CI, tests, and nightly builds for QA.
ISV Engineer
Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems)
- Evangelized Oracle technologies and helped vendors to use Java and Solaris technologies in a more efficient way.
- Managed a few distributed teams to implement custom integrations and new architectures.
- Handled performance testing for new hardware and optimize software for software-in-silicon.
- Implemented a few integrations between Oracle Identity Management products and a few ERP systems from the Russian market.
Performance Architect
Top4Top
- Worked with the Flash front end and Java back end on a MySQL, Solaris, and Tomcat cluster on Nginx.
Team Lead/Architect
Epam Systems
- Handled various Java outsourcing projects with Russian and foreign customers.
- Implemented a few intranet systems with GWT.
Senior Java Developer
Diasoft
- Developed an internet client for a banking system with JEE stack technologies.
Java Developer
Luxoft
- Worked on a few Java outsourcing projects with JSE and JEE technologies.
Experience
Virtual File System for Amazon S3
https://github.com/abashev/vfs-s3Education
Master's Degree in Computer Engineering
Bauman Moscow State University - Moscow, Russia
Certifications
Solaris 10 System Administrator
Oracle
Sun Certified Java Programmer – Java 6 (SCJP)
Sun
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, Jira REST API, OpenAPI, Java Servlets, Social APIs, Social Media APIs, API Development, Stripe Connect, Google APIs, Google Maps API, Facebook API, Telegram Bot API, Stripe, Stripe API, React, Claude API, LinkedIn API, JAX-RS
Tools
Terraform, GitHub, Gradle, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Claude, Claude Code, Amazon OpenSearch, Apache Tomcat, NGINX, WildFly, Apache Maven, Oracle SOA Suite, Kafka Streams, n8n, ChatGPT, Flash, IDEA IDE, Git, Cucumber
Languages
Java, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, Python, TypeScript, Java 21, Java 7, Groovy, Kotlin, Go, GraphQL, Gremlin, HTML5, Perl
Frameworks
Spring, GWT, Spring Boot, JUnit, Thymeleaf, Bootstrap, Swagger, Hibernate, Apache Spark, Hadoop, Swing, JNI, Next.js, LangGraph, Spring AI
Paradigms
Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), Web Architecture, Requirements Analysis, DevOps, REST, Agile Project Management, Automation, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Agile, Model View Presenter (MVP), Real-time Systems, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), ACID, Event-driven Architecture, Agile Software Development, Scrum, ETL, Mobile Development
Platforms
JEE, Solaris, Linux, Windows, Docker, AWS Lambda, Amazon Web Services (AWS), JVM, Oracle, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Shopify, Twilio, Oracle Database, MacOS, AWS IoT
Storage
MongoDB, Memcached, Amazon SDB, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Amazon Aurora, Databases, Oracle PL/SQL, JSON, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Database Architecture, Redshift, NoSQL, Data Pipelines, Berkeley DB, Oracle Rdb, Amazon DynamoDB, Cache, Redis, PostgreSQL, Google Cloud
Industry Expertise
Project Management
Other
SaaS, Deployment, Technical Leadership, Architecture, System Architecture, China, APIs, API Integration, Full-stack Development, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Payment APIs, Back-end, HTTPS, Webhooks, SDKs, Cloud Architecture, Engineering, CTO, Leadership, PWA, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs), Low Latency, Jira Administration, Third-party Integration, CI/CD Pipelines, Front-end, Full-stack, Large-scale Projects, Performance, Web Development, New Products, Software as a Service (SaaS), Strategy, Software Architecture, Team Leadership, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Distributed Systems, AWS Cloud Architecture, Payments, Reliability, Security, Dashboards, Platforms, Third-party APIs, Cloud Infrastructure, Data Integrity, Infrastructure, Scalability, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Data Processing, Real-time Data, Prompt Engineering, Workflow Automation & System Integration, eCommerce, AI Engineering, Process Automation, HTTP, Middleware, Authentication, Cloudflare, Zero Trust, OpenTelemetry, Fractional CTO, Team Management, Data Architecture, Data Modeling, Solution Architecture, System Design, Systems Design, Technical Documentation, Code Review, Code Auditing, Debugging, Web Scraping, Database Schema Design, Consulting, System Integration, Event-driven Systems, Ledgers, LinkedIn, Multitenancy, Hibernate 3, Software Design, Technical Architecture, Technical Consulting, WebSockets, Big Data, Networking, Document Parsing, Data Engineering, Parquet, Online Payments, Quarkus, Minecraft Mods, Google BigQuery, Large Language Models (LLMs), Machine Learning, Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), Data Science, AI Agents, AI Integration, Fintech, Mobile Apps, Fraud Detection, Agentic AI, Anthropic, Finance, OpenAI, GraphDB, Know Your Customer (KYC), Mobile Payments, Videos, Video Streaming, Flyweight Pattern, Ring Buffer, Low-latency Software, Mechanical Sympathy, Aeron, Sequenced Architecture, FIX Protocol, Internet of Things (IoT), WhatsApp, LangGraph4j, Vector Databases
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