
Zumrat Kochshegulov
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Toptal member since May 13, 2020
Zumrat is a seasoned software engineer and team lead with 7+ years of experience building and scaling high-impact products for industry leaders like Yandex, TikTok, and Amazon. His core expertise lies in distributed systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure. Passionate about solving complex technical problems and mentoring high-performing engineering teams, he seeks to leverage his skills to deliver exceptional value on challenging back-end and distributed computing projects through Toptal.
Portfolio
Experience
- Django - 6 years
- Python 3 - 6 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
- Django REST Framework - 5 years
- AWS Lambda - 3 years
- React - 3 years
- Microservices - 3 years
- Docker - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Slack, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Linux, Telegram Bots, MacOS
The most amazing...
...app I've made was for a food delivery startup in Korea. With it, people can easily order halal, kosher, or vegetarian food without knowing the local language.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Yandex
- Led the design and implementation of a multi-cluster Kafka strategy on Yandex Cloud, reducing latency by 40% and lowering projected annual costs by 22%.
- Orchestrated the Standardization of event schemas and the deployment of a self-service Kafka onboarding platform, cutting new topic provisioning time from three days to 30 minutes.
- Pioneered the "event-driven first" initiative, migrating four key monolithic workflows to Kafka, unlocking real-time capabilities and enabling a new customer analytics product.
Senior Software Engineer
TikTok
- Contributed to the PoC of live subscription for web, Android, and iOS platforms.
- Launched gift subscription and anniversary offer features that increased the company's monthly revenue by 5%.
- Initiated and built an internal contract dashboard from scratch used by customer support, QA, and on-call engineers.
Software Engineer
Amazon.com
- Built multiple HR internal products for Amazon-wide use.
- Added API endpoints, monitoring, and logging systems.
- Provided technical support and troubleshot consumer issues weekly while on-call.
Software Engineer
SK Telecom
- Developed an internal platform, allowing non-engineering professionals to run, test, and apply various configurations on multiple machine-learning models. Coding knowledge was not required as every feature was available on the web browser.
- Built multiple API endpoints using Go (Gin framework). Added API versioning, API Gateway, Swagger documentation, and also API endpoints for mobile app users.
- Created an analytics service to gather data from various sources (Google BigQuery tables and HDFS). Calculated basic statistical metrics, such as standard deviation, number of distinct values, mean, etc.
Software Engineer
ST Unitas
- Developed an internal coding test platform (similar to Codility.com) so that new applicants can solve algorithms problems in limited time. I started from scratch and my tasks included everything from front end and back end to production deployment.
- Added platform-use progress APIs, added various graphs, and pie charts using Chart.js open-source framework.
- Managed new recruits and interns during trial periods.
Experience
Creatable
I developed this product for about a year with a team of three developers. My part was to build the back end, CI/CD, and deployment. Some of the features I added included the front end as well.
Technologies: Python, Flask, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, jQuery, AWS EC2/S3
Driver Tracking Service
https://uvu.kz/Technologies: Python 3.7+, Django, AWS ECS Fargate, Traccar open source library, GitHub workflow, pytest
Math Problem Solver App
http://qanda.aiWaggle
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, AWS EC2/S3
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
UNIST | Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology - Ulsan, Korea
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology - Hong Kong
Certifications
Bronze Medalist
ACM ICPC Semi Finals (APAC Region)
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, SQLAlchemy, Beautiful Soup, Stripe, Stripe API, Node.js, Twilio API, WebRTC
Tools
GitHub, CircleCI, Slack, Stripe Checkout, GitLab, Prisma, ELK (Elastic Stack), Jenkins, Celery, RabbitMQ, Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, *nux Shells
Languages
Python 3, JavaScript, Go, Python, Bash, GraphQL, TypeScript, HTML, HTML5, CSS, Bash Script, PHP, Java, Java 8, Ruby, C++
Frameworks
Django, Flask, Swagger, Django REST Framework, Tailwind CSS, Next.js, NestJS, React Native, Redux, OAuth 2, Material UI, Ruby on Rails 5
Paradigms
REST, Microservices, ETL, Automation, Management
Platforms
Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Lambda, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Vercel, Twilio, MacOS, Azure, WordPress, Langfuse, Apache Kafka, Yandex Cloud
Storage
PostgreSQL, Databases, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Data Pipelines, Google Cloud, Cloud Firestore
Other
Back-end, Full-stack, Stripe Payments, OAuth, Chatbots, Scripting, Large Language Models (LLMs), Video Generation, Architecture, Technical Leadership, Apple Pay, Third-party APIs, Platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Full-stack Development, Computer Vision, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Web Development, Document Parsing, APIs, Back-end Development, API Integration, Microsoft 365, Payment APIs, Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG), Algorithms, Data Structures, Telegram Bots
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