Phil Pirozhkov
Verified Expert in Engineering
Ruby Developer
Antalya, Turkey
Toptal member since April 1, 2014
Phil is a top engineer with a proven ability to develop efficient solutions to complex problems. He has experience and skills with all levels of software and architecture. He has worked in a variety of roles, from an individual developer to a technical lead. Phil is deeply involved with open-source software and keeps an eye on a wide range of technologies in order to use the best tool to perform any programming job.
Portfolio
Experience
- Ruby - 11 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 11 years
- Java - 10 years
- Test-driven Development (TDD) - 7 years
- Linux - 7 years
- PostgreSQL - 7 years
- JavaScript - 6 years
- VoIP - 2 years
Preferred Environment
MacOS, Linux, Git, Vim Text Editor, RSpec, Performance, DevOps
The most amazing...
...things I've coded are a voice/SMS development tool in JavaScript hosted at the carrier and an SMS spam filtering solution targeted to mobile network operators.
Work Experience
Ruby on Rails/Site Reliability Engineer
Spring
- Optimized the application for resource utilization.
- Found and eliminated numerous slow SQL queries and N+1 SQLs.
- Adjusted servers' formation to adequately meet the load.
- Introduced dynamic scaling for web servers and background jobs.
- Filed proposals for further scaling improvements if the server load happens to grow 10x.
Senior Back-end Ruby Developer
Toptal
- Tuned Sidekiq to meet 99.99% SLA on processing latency in mere seconds.
- Got to the bottom of Sidekiq rolling restarts issues with Capistrano-style deployments.
- Wrote and open-sourced the ActiveJob/Sidekiq best practices and style guide.
- Fixed all the unverified doubles in the test suite, counting almost a thousand.
- Led the development of a queue-based distributed test runner for RSpec.
- Discovered and addressed edge cases with let_it_be, caching test helper.
- Open-sourced a number of the company's internal tools.
- Shared my experience with colleagues and encouraging them to share their own experiences in kind.
Ruby on Rails Developer
Clickfunnels (via Toptal)
- Maintained the back end of a world-leading landing page builder.
- Improved test coverage and decoupled a monolithic application into its individual components.
- Added transparent third-party API introspection in a multi-tenant environment.
- Tracked down the most mysterious bugs still in the system.
Senior Ruby Developer
DataArt
- Maintained a massive Ruby on Rails application and reworked legacy code that was hard to comprehend.
- Improved the front and back ends and introduced tools to allow direct development on local machines over a VPN instead of a remote desktop.
- Reviewed code and mentored colleagues throughout the process.
Co-founder and Rails Back-end Engineer
Skillpocket
- Developed the back end of a marketplace platform, website, and mobile API.
- Implemented geo matching and developed a matching algorithm using multiple parameters.
- Maintained and tweaked the platform under rapidly changing marketing strategies.
- Kept the code clean, readable, and rock-solid even after all major changes were implemented.
Software Engineer
Bandwidth Labs (via OnTarget)
- Developed a working prototype of a voice and SMS development in JavaScript, hosted by the carrier.
- Created a working prototype of a SMS spam detection system aimed at mobile network operators.
- Developed a back-end authorization system for a bleeding edge WiFi HotSpot 2.0 wireless roaming service.
- Helped improve the development process.
- Developed architecture for applications, choosing the best tools to fit the task.
Web Developer
SAP AG (via Softwerke)
- Developed an internal system for document management as part of the internal team.
- Participated in adoption of a continuous integration system.
- Improved security framework significantly with a roles and permissions system.
- Helped with server configuration management.
- Led technical interviews and hired some youth developers that became invaluable for the company.
Java Developer
NEON/IBM/Arsenal/Bank of America/AT&T/Visual Mining (via BridgeQuest Labs, Inc.)
- Created rich UI with Swing.
- Created a database migration tool to ensure data integrity between schema versions.
- Supported an Eclipse plugin to visualize data.
- Created new data visualizations with HTML and JS.
- Kept an eye on code quality, performing refactoring and code review.
Experience
Switchcoder
Skillpocket
Sinatra/EventMachine streaming + Redis PubSub
https://gist.github.com/pirj/3377714Narrative AI-generated Text Adventure Game
Education
Master's Degree in Network systems, Telecommunications, and Computer Engineering
State University of Telecommunications - Saint-Petersburg, Russia
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Sidekiq, D3.js, Nokogiri, jQuery, Leaflet, Claude API, Backbone.js, RADIUS, Facebook API, Google API, Facebook Open Graph API, Telegram Bot API
Tools
RSpec, Terminal, Vim Text Editor, Rake, RVM, Claude Code, Git, Geocoder, Apache JMeter, VirtualBox, V8, NGINX, FreeSWITCH, Capistrano
Languages
Ruby, HTML, CSS, Java, Lua, JavaScript, SQL-99, Haml, SQL, Perl, Erlang
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Sinatra, Selenium, Spring, Hibernate, Ext JS
Paradigms
Metaprogramming, Unit Testing, DevOps, Test-driven Development (TDD), Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Rapid Prototyping, Model View Controller (MVC), Event-driven Programming, KISS, Load Testing, Object-oriented Design (OOD), Asynchronous Programming, Test Automation, Continuous Integration (CI), Functional Programming, Distributed Programming, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Concurrent Programming, Declarative Programming
Platforms
Heroku, Linux, MacOS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
Redis, PostgreSQL, Memcached, MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB
Other
Team Mentoring, Single-page Applications (SPAs), Unix Shell Scripting, Network Programming, Parsers, Architecture, Performance, Prompt Engineering, API Integration, Data Matching, User Experience (UX), VoIP, Machine Learning, Cryptography, OAuth, TCP/IP, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), BaaN, AI Engineering
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