Konstantin Tchernov, Developer in Auckland, New Zealand
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Konstantin Tchernov

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Auckland, New Zealand
Toptal Member Since
May 17, 2022

Konstantin is a passionate developer with over 14 years of experience across various technology stacks. He has worked in leading roles at several New Zealand's top companies, delivering global products. Konstantin specializes in DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and cloud solution architecture. He takes special interests in high-performing systems, observability, and building tools that make people's lives easier.

Portfolio

Dave Clark Design Associates
JavaScript, Bash, Terraform, Linux, Cloud Architecture, AWS DevOps, DevOps...
Whip Around
AWS CloudFormation, Kotlin, OpenCV, Google Cloud API, Cloud Architecture...
Xero
AWS Certified Solution Architect, Cloud Architecture, Web Security, GDPR, SOC 2...

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Docker, Linux, Bash, AWS Lambda, TypeScript, Python

The most amazing...

...thing I've built is a startup that turned into a successful SaaS platform. I built the team and platform architecture from the ground up.

Work Experience

Technical Lead

2021 - PRESENT
Dave Clark Design Associates
  • Designed and built a cost-efficient high-uptime self-hosting platform to easily spin up multiple smaller sites on shared resources. This enabled us to onboard new clients at a low cost, running on more reliable infrastructure than public web hosts.
  • Rearchitected a SaaS platform for cost saving and performance. It saved the client approximately 25% on hosting fees, reduced our manual overheads, and improved production resilience to morning-rush spikes in traffic.
  • Created simple-to-use tools for developers to run local environments in a setup similar to cloud environments, reducing the number of issues caused by prod vs dev differences.
  • Built a solution on a cluster of CentOS Linux VMs for a banking client with specific on-premise requirements. This included a redundant multi-master replication of databases (MariaDB Galera Cluster) and special auditing requirements.
Technologies: JavaScript, Bash, Terraform, Linux, Cloud Architecture, AWS DevOps, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Amazon CloudFront CDN, CentOS, Debian, Docker, Docker Compose, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), SQL, MariaDB, NGINX, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Content Delivery Networks (CDN), ECS, AWS Fargate, Database Replication, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Lead Developer

2018 - 2021
Whip Around
  • Took part if the companyʼs senior leadership team, influencing both technical and product strategies.
  • Increased the end-to-end system reliability and established new SLOs focusing on the end user that we reported to the board.
  • Containerized and broke down monolithic architecture, moving toward microservices, improving the resilience of the system in production, and catering to the companyʼs fast growth. Completely removed weekly maintenance runbooks.
  • Built monitoring and alerting with a DevOps culture around it. Trained back-end developers to get them across.
  • Implemented an OCR solution to scan truck odometers and engine hours, including back-end Python scripting with OpenCV, running on AWS Lambda and connected to Google Cloud API. Implemented an accuracy reporting system and a regression suite.
  • Coached two technical leads to support the people leadership.
Technologies: AWS CloudFormation, Kotlin, OpenCV, Google Cloud API, Cloud Architecture, AWS DevOps, Bash, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Docker, PostgreSQL, SQL, PHP, AWS Lambda, GitLab CI/CD, Datadog, Python, Google Cloud SDK, NGINX, Serverless Architecture, Amazon DynamoDB, Bitbucket, Gradle, Swift, Fastlane, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Senior Full-stack Developer

2017 - 2018
Xero
  • Rearchitected the platform to move heavy operations to scalable back-end workers while keeping rate limits and DB loads in mind. Achieved much higher platform performance that could be demoed live with large datasets.
  • Integrated a lot of other Xero services, ensuring high cross-team collaboration and meeting strict requirements around security.
  • Helped develop a Node.js back end. Used Docker with PostgreSQL, Lambda with DynamoDB, Terraform and Serverless for IaC with Octopus Deploy, and TeamCity for CI/CD.
Technologies: AWS Certified Solution Architect, Cloud Architecture, Web Security, GDPR, SOC 2, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Docker, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Terraform, Octopus Deploy, AWS CodePipeline, Serverless Architecture, Serverless Framework, Redux, Sagas, Node.js, Docker Compose, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub, AWS DevOps, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Mobile Technical Lead

2015 - 2017
Pushpay
  • Led mobile development during the company’s highest growth phase. Coordinated between two and five people with hands-on development.
  • Reduced the app release cycle from 6+ weeks to two weeks while increasing the app stability through a culture of automated testing, including end-to-end and unit tests.
  • Increased the app reliability to over 99% crash-free sessions.
  • Added code quality metrics and minimum coverage for unit tests as part of TeamCity builds, greatly improving code coverage and code quality over time.
Technologies: TeamCity, Android, React, JavaScript, Java, Swift, Fastlane, Ruby, Appium

Technical Lead

2013 - 2015
Fiserv
  • Provided technical leadership for three scrum teams of .NET and mobile developers, varying from five to 15 developers.
  • Set up and administered an in-house Jenkins cluster for around 100 developers.
  • Developed Android and iOS business banking applications at a large US-based company. I was also responsible for the security of the application.
  • Built relationships across multiple departments at a large company.
  • Made contact with senior Apple developers, establishing relationships between the company and Apple.
  • Introduced Git to the company., establishing a better approach to branching and code reviews.
  • Hosted in-house training sessions and meetup-type groups to improve the understanding of software security within the company.
Technologies: Jenkins, JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift, iOS, Android, Cordova, Ant Design, Objective-C, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub, DevOps

Team Lead

2008 - 2013
Navman Technology
  • Started as a C/C++ developer working on map data compression algorithms running on Linux servers with IBM DB2 SQL and low-level data access on Windows CE devices.
  • Took on responsibility as a team lead of seven developers and transitioned from C++ to a mix of Android and iOS development with shared code in C++. I was responsible for line management as well as the architecture for the codebase.
  • Managed external contractors in Ukraine, ensuring timely and quality delivery from them.
Technologies: C++, Linux, C, Java, Android, Objective-C, iOS, Perl, SQL, GCC, GNU Make, IBM Db2, Bash, Windows CE, CI/CD Pipelines

Software Developer

2008 - 2008
Kiwiplan
  • Built the back-end server with Java and Hibernate and front ends in JSP and Java Swing.
  • Developed a new web interface with JSP, HTML/CSS, and Ajax for touch screen monitors, which were a novelty at the time.
  • Created Maven build scripts running on Linux and HP Unix systems.
Technologies: Java, Hibernate, SQL, Linux, Swing, JavaScript, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Apache Maven, Ajax, MySQL, Spring

Whip Around | Reliability

https://whiparound.com/
I started at Whip Around as one of its first developers, and the SaaS company saw fast growth. I rearchitected the monolith back end to a scalable multiservice system to cope with growing platform volume and changing use cases from new, more demanding customers.

When we still saw a small number of unacceptable failures reported through our customer success team, I conceived and won approval for a project to improve the reliability of key parts of our user flow.

Led the project to add new metrics and more fine-grained SLOs to get us the extra reliability we needed in the company's core area of business. I enhanced our suite of cloud metrics, introducing detailed performance tracking, front-end tracking, and security indicators.

I took that further than cloud system metrics—to tracking failures that a user might see through business intelligence data. We could then detect failures on a user level that may not have been obvious just from cloud performance metrics. This was a coordinated effort to combine data from various front-end channels (web and mobile) and back end.

Xero Lifelong Learning | Add-on for a Global Accounting Platform

https://www.xero.com/blog/2018/04/students-xero-lifelong-learning-platform/
A greenfield system to dynamically generate templated organizations inside Xero, a global accounting SaaS platform. This would allow university lecturers to create templates for accounting organizations and invite 300+ students at a time to the platform, each student getting their own sandbox.

This required connecting to many different subsystems within Xero, and it had specific performance requirements to allow spinning up these large datasets on-demand and quickly.

I rearchitected the platform to perform these heavy organizations on back-end workers that would scale with the load while rate-limiting to not place too much load on the rest of the internal services at Xero. As it was an accounting platform, there were also many strict privacy and security requirements, SOC 2 audit compliance, and GDPR compliance.

My new architecture put the generation of these organizations on a background worker queue. I also worked with several teams within Xero across multiple countries to give us the right tools to access their secure services.

This resulted in a successful product with a much higher performance than we could proudly demo live with large datasets.

Dave Clark Design Associates | Investment Research Platform

A private investment research platform with stock tracking and private research articles. This was subcontracted from the client to my agency.

I made architectural adjustments to the platform for improved performance and reduced cost. I also gave the developers much better tooling to maintain the platform.

The cost was a big concern for the client, so I implemented a proposal to move to managed containers (AWS Fargate), removing the need for software updates to the underlying hosts while setting up timed regular deployments of containers to pick up security patches frequently. I also introduced and tuned auto-scaling to keep costs minimal while supporting the client's growth.

With several other proposals I made, the result was a 25% decrease in cloud hosting fees and reduced person-hour fees in platform maintenance.

I moved the core services to use trunk-based CI/CD in GitHub Actions on the developer side. The Docker containers that were built could then be pulled and run by developers for local development, reducing the disparities between local and cloud environments. I also won client approval to pay for Datadog to enhance the monitoring for this project.

Languages

Bash, Kotlin, Python 3, JavaScript, Java, Python, C++, TypeScript, SQL, PHP, Swift, C, Objective-C, Perl, Ruby

Tools

Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Docker Compose, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon CloudWatch, GitLab CI/CD, Sumo Logic, Amazon CloudFront CDN, TeamCity, Jenkins, Apache Maven, GitHub, GitLab, AWS CodeBuild, Bitbucket, NGINX, Apache, AWS Fargate, Gradle, Fastlane, GCC, GNU Make

Paradigms

DevOps, Business Intelligence (BI), Serverless Architecture

Platforms

Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, AWS Lambda, CentOS, Debian, Android, iOS, Google Cloud SDK, Windows CE

Other

Software Development, Cloud Architecture, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), CI/CD Pipelines, Serverless, Web Security, Mathematics, Computer Science, Cloud, AWS DevOps, AWS CodePipeline, SOC Compliance, GDPR, AWS Certified Solution Architect, SOC 2, Octopus Deploy, Web Application Firewall (WAF), Content Delivery Networks (CDN), ECS, Sagas, Cordova, Ajax

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, OpenCV, Google Cloud API, React

Storage

Datadog, Amazon DynamoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Database Replication, IBM Db2

Frameworks

Hibernate, Swing, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Serverless Framework, Redux, Appium, Ant Design, Spring

2007 - 2008

Postgraduate Diploma in Computer Science

University of Auckland - Auckland, New Zealand

2004 - 2007

Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science

University of Auckland - Auckland, New Zealand

JULY 2022 - JULY 2025

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

AWS

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