Alex Gridnev
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Engineer and Developer
Limassol, Cyprus
Toptal member since October 25, 2022
Alex is a systems architect and software engineer with 11+ years of back-end and full-stack experience designing, implementing, and continuously deploying large-scale, low-latency projects capable of processing 100,000+ messages per second for platforms serving 500,000+ customers. Alex has launched revenue-generating products (up to several million dollars annually) from the ground up and helped a company get accepted into a top-tier startup accelerator in the US.
Portfolio
Experience
- Relational Databases - 10 years
- Object-oriented Programming (OOP) - 10 years
- Java - 8 years
- TypeScript - 5 years
- Scala - 4 years
- JavaScript - 4 years
- Functional Programming - 4 years
- React - 3 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, Java, TypeScript, Solidity, Scala, Kotlin, React, JavaScript
The most amazing...
...thing I've built is a distributed B2B Growegy platform from scratch—the company grew from 0 to 2,000 paying business customers and earned first revenue.
Work Experience
Software Architect
Growegy
- Created a distributed B2B Growegy platform (back and front end) from scratch, allowing the company to grow from 0 to 2,000 paying business customers and earn first revenue.
- Slashed business customer onboarding time from 30 to 1 minute through an internal CRM and automated profile provisioning, resulting in a 50% reduction in the time spent by the customer support department on onboarding tasks.
- Cut down QA verification time by 40% by ensuring end-to-end test coverage for both front- and back-end business scenarios and creating a subset of tests simulating real users' behavior in pre-production environments.
- Led the system architecture and engineering processes, resulting in regular releases and predictable deployment of new features by defining the strategy with executives and executing the delivery.
Back-end Scala Engineer
Immergion
- Created an architecture and led a B2B pivot, resulting in the company's new revenue stream that allowed business customers to organize online group fitness engagements for their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Elevated user retention by 15% through the creation of a user achievement system. This strategic implementation, featuring personalized leaderboards and analytics showcasing individual progress, effectively incentivized consistent system usage.
- Achieved a 20% acceleration in development speed by migrating from Cassandra DB to PostgreSQL. This optimization was realized by implementing diverse indexes, enabling the team to replace complex code with streamlined SQL queries.
- Accelerated crucial business flows by 8-10x by introducing batch updates into the PostgreSQL DB and parallel processing in back-end services.
- Delivered 100+ business features that increased customer satisfaction and retention by conceptualizing, implementing, and releasing them—many of which were based on my proposals.
Lead Full-stack Engineer
FxPro Group
- Revolutionized system performance, reducing custom report generation time from 30-40 to 3-5 minutes—accomplished through a redesign and expanded scaling of the distributed system, empowering the biz dev to validate ideas with heightened efficiency.
- Built the integration of an existing trading exchange platform with the Ethereum blockchain.
- Achieved tens of thousands of annual savings by seamlessly transitioning trading exchange services from Oracle DB to PostgreSQL DB. Additionally, addressed missing functionality by implementing cost-effective, custom, in-house solutions.
.NET Software Engineer
Spotware Systems
- Reduced traffic between the front-end desktop app and the back-end server by 40% by migrating the front-end app from text to binary protocol using Google Protocol Buffers.
- Increased customer revenue by 15% by developing and evolving an admin application for a trading platform that detected anomalies, helped prevent abuse, and adjusted system parameters based on market conditions.
- Oversaw a testing and releasing process for applications.
Experience
Growegy Web App
https://growegy.com/Messenger and Fitness App for Mobile Devices
I led the development of many business features, including gathering requirements, defining the architecture, and releasing the product. While researching throughput issues, I discovered the suboptimal ones, speeding up the slowest user queries by eight to ten times. Finally, I finished a massive project migration from Cassandra to PostgreSQL with a team of three members. It simplified and helped a back-end team speed up their development process significantly.
Education
Master's Degree in Informatics and Applied Mathematics
National University of Science and Technology MISiS - Moscow, Russia
Certifications
Ethereum and Solidity: The Complete Developer's Guide
Udemy
Advanced Solidity: Understanding and Optimizing Gas Costs
Udemy
Skills
Libraries/APIs
React, Node.js
Tools
IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Terraform, Ganache CLI, Ganache, Jira
Languages
Java, TypeScript, Scala, JavaScript, Solidity, Kotlin, HTML, CSS, SCSS, C#.NET
Paradigms
Test-driven Development (TDD), Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Agile, Scrum, Microservices
Storage
Relational Databases, PostgreSQL, Databases, Redis, Cassandra
Frameworks
Akka, Spring IoC, Spring, Cypress, .NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET, Hardhat
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Other
App Infrastructure, IT Management, CTO, Algorithms, Data Structures, Amazon RDS, Apache Cassandra, RESTful Microservices, IT Project Management
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