About
I'm a Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience, based in Helsinki, Finland. I work on products and features from idea to production as a full-stack engineer. I'm comfortable working independently, collaborating with others and I know when to ask for help.
I quickly adapt to new domains and tech stacks and I'm used to working with unclear requirements, trade-offs and changing priorities. I prefer simple, practical solutions over complex ones and value iterative development: shipping an MVP, getting feedback and improving step by step.
I've worked as an Engineering Manager with a strong tech lead component: communicating with stakeholders, product managers and engineering teams, while also planning and coordinating large technical initiatives and epics.
I'm a Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience based in Helsinki, Finland. I enjoy both frontend and backend development and feel comfortable taking ownership from idea to delivery and long-term support.
I focus on building practical solutions that bring clear business value. I prefer to understand the real problem behind a feature and choose the simplest effective approach, instead of overengineering.
I also have experience working as an Engineering Manager. This gave me a practical understanding of how product, technical and people decisions are connected.
As an engineer, this helps me work more effectively in real-world conditions. I'm comfortable with unclear requirements, trade-offs and changing priorities. I communicate early, take ownership of my work and collaborate with the team when it helps move things forward.
I enjoy working on different kinds of problems and choosing tools based on context. In my side projects, I've built several blockchain-related services and analytics service using Go, including custom Traefik plugins to process access logs. I've also worked on AI-related projects in Python due to the wide support for AI models in its ecosystem.
Beyond software, I work on ESP32-based hardware projects and 3D printing, which helps me connect software development with real-world devices.
Skills
Technologies and expertise
Experience
Professional journey
Senior Software Engineer• hybrid
- Joined the Creative group to strengthen the company's Creative Offering. Quickly onboarded and started delivering production features that helped improve customer adoption and retention.
- Led development of the HTML5 Template Editor and improved core workflows across multiple template editors (HTML5, Video and Image), impacting a large part of the creative pipeline.
- Designed and implemented a background worker system with monitoring, enabling reliable processing of heavy workloads while keeping the main application responsive.
- Identified and fixed Node.js event loop issues, significantly improving application stability and preventing production crashes.
- Built a scalable CSV import feature supporting thousands of creative variations, enabling customers to upload and manage large datasets efficiently.
- Developed public preview links for creatives, allowing customers to share content externally for better collaboration.
- Worked across multiple teams, leading technical discussions.
Engineering Manager• hybrid
- Led an engineering team of 5-8 people working on the Looker Studio integration, one of the business core products, consistenly delivering all features on time and supporting team growth.
- Improved developer experience by writing clear documentation for product features and technical systems, and replacing manual local setup with scripts, reducing setup time from days to minutes.
- Improved product stability by reducing crash rate and support tickets, fixing production issues and allowing users to make more requests without hitting quota limits.
- Automated the deployment process and moved CI/CD to GitHub, replacing hours of manual work with automated releases and enabling multiple deployments per day.
- Built monitoring and analytics dashboards to detect when the product is not working, measure performance and find problem areas in user flows, helping the team react faster to issues.
Engineering Manager• remote
- Led a team of 6-9 engineers working on campaign management across multiple ad platforms.
- Led the technical design of campaign management in Reporting, making read-only table cells editable for campaign settings across multiple platforms.
- Built a shared framework for campaign management, used by several internal teams to support different platforms.
- Supported team growth: one engineer grew into a team lead and others to mid-level engineers. The team became independent and proactive, driving initiatives without close supervision.
- Improved development processes: design reviews and product context discussions happened before development, helping the team influence solutions early, speed up delivery, and reduce bugs.
Senior Software Developer• onsite
- Built the frontend for the "Facebook Lift Test" feature from scratch, creating the first user interface to display lift test results clearly and make them usable for customers.
- Led the migration of A/B and lift test views from Angular to React using incremental steps, improving UI/UX while keeping the product working during the transition.
- Migrated internal Python services from semi-manual deployments to CI/CD on Kubernetes, upgraded Python 2->3 and added metrics and logging to improve stability and observability.
- Actively contributed to the shared React UI component library and turned it into an internal documentation site, making components easy to discover.
- Designed and built a new service for multi-platform ad study testing. Introduced NestJS, which later became widely used in the company to simplify onboarding for new developers.
- Participated in an early Kubernetes pilot project, helping launch one of the first services built on Kubernetes in the company.
Web Developer → Team Lead• onsite
Developed and maintained multiple websites, including migrating legacy systems to modern platforms and frameworks. Led teams of up to 10 people, implemented CI/CD practices and contributed to various projects ranging from helpdesk systems to real estate platforms.
Worked with diverse technologies including PHP, Python, JavaScript, React, Angular and various databases. Gained experience in both frontend and backend development, as well as team leadership and project management.
Publications
On my personal website, I share information about my projects and occasionally publish short technical notes related to software engineering: https://kulikov.fi