Senior Backend Engineer - Observability & Systems

Sign in Senior Backend Engineer - Observability & Systems Location: Seattle, WA Posted: September 30, 2026 Contact this candidate Resume: Valentyn Semikov Senior Backend Engineer — Distributed Systems & Observability Seattle, WA • 425-***-**** • *****************@*****.*** • [контакт скрыт] Authorized to work in the US for any employer without sponsorship. SUMMARY Senior backend engineer with 14 years designing and operating highly available distributed services in production. Specialized in telemetry pipelines, observability platforms, and production reliability — built monitoring and alerting systems that cut mean detection time from 60 minutes to 5 and false-positive alerts from 30% to 5% across a fleet of 100+ products in 30+ locales. Python, event-driven architecture on Kafka and RabbitMQ at ~2M transactions per day, containerized on Docker and Kubernetes. Owns services end-to-end: architecture, delivery infrastructure, instrumentation, on-call, and incident response. EXPERIENCE Professional Development — Seattle, WA Independent Study Mar 2026 – Present • Self-directed study in algorithms, computational complexity theory, and discrete mathematics for computer science. BrainRocket — Limassol, Cyprus (Remote) Senior Software Engineer (promoted from Software Engineer) Sep 2020 – Mar 2026 Multinational iGaming, fintech, and marketing technology company; ~1,800 engineers across five countries operating 100+ consumer products under real-money regulatory and uptime constraints. • Designed a self-service observability layer surfacing environment health signals to 200+ staff across engineering, content, analytics, and sales, cutting false-positive alerts from 30% to 5% and mean time to detection from 60 minutes to 5 minutes. • Owned a distributed monitoring service (Python, Jira API) validating content deliverability across 100+ brands and 30+ locales, reducing failed deliveries from 13% to 1% and routing actionable alerts to owning teams instead of a shared queue. • Automated compliance validation across 100+ brands and 30+ locales in a licensed real-money environment where a bad release is a regulatory incident, cutting erroneous releases from ~2,000 to under 10 per month. • Architected migration of a geo-distributed content platform (MongoDB, Cloudflare CDN, DigitalOcean) to CDN-backed delivery for 2M+ active users, cutting storage by 97% (14 TB to 419 GB) and publish latency by 75% (4 hours to 1 hour). • Consolidated three client codebases into one by integrating a cross-platform Flutter client into the internal CMS, eliminating ~$14.8K per month in duplicated maintenance and build costs. • Applied AI-assisted development (GitHub Copilot) to code review, test generation, serialization logic, and third-party integration work, and shared repeatable prompting patterns with the wider engineering group. CompStak — New York, NY (Remote) Software Engineer, Contract Aug 2019 – Aug 2020 • Led a 4-engineer team building a Python data-validation framework on GitLab CI/CD, architecting 120 automated validation suites integrated directly into the deployment pipeline. • Instrumented build-level failure reporting, isolating failures per commit, cutting release-blocking defects from 5–10 to 0–2 per release. • Established API and pipeline documentation on Confluence, removing the dependency on subject-matter experts for system architecture context and shortening engineering onboarding. Admitad — Kyiv, Ukraine Software Engineer, Contract Feb 2019 – Jul 2019 • Designed request/response simulators for 35 microservices replaying mutated production traffic through GitLab CI/CD, catching contract-breaking changes pre-deploy and reducing production rollbacks by 30%. • Built a Flask and Grafana service visualizing simulated traffic patterns for engineering and management stakeholders. BetLab — Kyiv, Ukraine Software Engineer, Contract Sep 2017 – Jan 2019 • Owned data-integrity services on Kafka and RabbitMQ pipelines processing ~2M transactions per day, detecting parsing failures and UTC/DST time-drift bugs before they reached downstream consumers. • Standardized data-quality practices across 13 departments, cutting recurring data incidents from thousands to hundreds per month through targeted, low-risk fixes on a platform where broad changes risked regressions. RingCentral — Kyiv, Ukraine Software Engineer Jun 2015 – Aug 2017 • Reduced release cycle time from 5–10 days to 2–5 on a cloud communications platform by building automated validation into 8–10 Jenkins pipelines (Java). • Established the requirements and spec process for an under-documented product, reverse-engineering existing behavior into written specifications and translating US product-owner intent into actionable work across a 10-hour time-zone gap. Samsung R&D Institute Ukraine — Kyiv, Ukraine Software Developer (promoted from Junior Software Developer) Oct 2012 – May 2015 • Developed the Samsung Smart TV remote-control application (JavaScript, Objective-C) shipped to consumers worldwide, implementing device discovery, pairing, and media playback control against the TV platform service APIs. • Delivered features on a globally distributed team spanning Samsung R&D sites in Korea and Eastern Europe, coordinating API contracts and release cycles for firmware-bundled releases. TECHNICAL SKILLS Languages: Python (primary), JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL Distributed Systems: Microservices, event-driven architecture, REST APIs, high-availability services, system design, API design Observability & Reliability: Monitoring and alerting, telemetry pipelines, incident response, on-call operations, root-cause analysis, Grafana, health and diagnostics instrumentation Data & Messaging: Kafka, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, SQL databases, ETL and data pipelines, Pandas Cloud & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, GCP, Cloudflare CDN, DigitalOcean, Firebase CI/CD & Automation: GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, TeamCity, automated testing and validation AI-Assisted Development: GitHub Copilot, agentic coding workflows, AI-assisted code review and test generation EDUCATION Master of Science, Computer Science Sevastopol University for Nuclear Energy and Industry — Ukraine Contact this candidate PostJobFree Delete or Update my resume About Terms of Service Privacy FAQ Contact us