Ilia Alakov

open to new opportunities

Ilia Alakov

Senior Backend Engineer

I build backends that stay boring under load — event-driven services, data pipelines and SQL that survives production. 6+ years shipping systems people actually use, from enterprise microservices to a Telegram product with ~300K monthly users.

GitHub LinkedIn Telegram

01 What I actually move

Four things I get hired for, and what they looked like in production.

Backend architecture

Owned the Incident Management domain through a monolith to microservices migration: service boundaries, contracts, and the architecture calls behind them.

Led 3 engineers for ~6 months

Data & SQL at scale

Queries with 10–20+ joins over historical datasets, lock contention, dashboards that stopped timing out. Plus a full Oracle to PostgreSQL migration with ETL and validation.

Oracle → PostgreSQL, ETL, tuning

Event-driven systems

Kafka producers and consumers for resilient inter-service and external data exchange, async background jobs, and analytics pipelines tracking activation, retention and conversion.

~1.5M events / day

Automation that pays

An AI content pipeline — transcription, analysis, clip generation, publishing — running unattended at 60 videos/day across 6 channels. Analytics found the paywall moment worth +12%.

5M+ views in 90 days

02 Experience

Six years, three very different kinds of load.

  1. Sep 2025 — Jun 2026 Contract

    Senior Backend Engineer · Telegram-based SaaS (NDA)

    • Owned backend architecture for a product at ~300K MAU, ~75 RPS, ~1.5M events/day.
    • Built core APIs and async background jobs for user flows, content delivery and monetization.
    • Designed analytics pipelines for activation, retention and conversion — behavioural analysis found the optimal paywall timing, lifting paid conversion ~12%.
    • Built “Content Factory”, a multi-stage AI pipeline (transcription → analysis → clip generation → publishing) producing up to 60 videos/day across 6 channels — 2,500+ videos, 5M+ views in 90 days.
    • Supported the system through continuous database growth and high event volume.

    PHP / LaravelPythonMySQLRedisDockerTelegram Bot APIGrafana

  2. Oct 2024 — Sep 2025 Project-based

    Backend Engineer · Spectr — retail & banking

    • Built analytics pipelines and Grafana dashboards for enterprise reporting and operational metrics.
    • Optimized complex SQL over large historical datasets, making dashboards responsive again.
    • Took part in an Oracle → PostgreSQL migration: ETL pipelines, data validation, performance tuning.
    • Worked on systems where reporting correctness and data consistency were the product.

    PostgreSQLOracleSQLETLGrafana

  3. Jul 2020 — Oct 2024 4+ years

    Backend Engineer · Smart Data — enterprise software

    • Owned the Incident Management domain during the monolith to microservices migration; defined service boundaries and drove architecture decisions.
    • Led a team of 3 engineers for ~6 months, mentored juniors, unblocked backend, SQL and integration issues.
    • Integrated Kafka flows for resilient inter-service and external-system data exchange.
    • Optimized SQL with 10–20+ joins; resolved production DB locks and performance degradation.
    • Designed a reusable S3 integration library adopted across internal services.
    • Configured GCP service integrations — IAM roles, service accounts, secrets, API access — and used BigQuery to validate exported operational data.

    JavaKotlinSpring BootPostgreSQLKafkaRedisDockerKubernetesPrometheusAWS S3GCP

03 Things I built on my own time

23 public repos, a game on Steam and apps on Google Play. Star counts load live from the GitHub API.

All repositories on GitHub

04 Stack

Tools I’ve shipped production code with, not a list of things I’ve read about.

Languages

JavaKotlinPythonPHPSQLDart

Backend

Spring BootLaravelRESTMicroservicesMonolithsEvent-driven

Data

PostgreSQLOracleMySQLRedisKafkaETLBigQuery

Infra & ops

DockerKubernetesAWS S3GCP IAMPrometheusGrafana

Education

BSc, Informatics & Computer Engineering
Irkutsk National Research Technical University, 2018–2022

Languages

English — professional working
Russian — native

Also out there

A racing game on Steam
Apps on Google Play
Writing on Habr · Medium

05 Let’s talk

Looking for someone to own a backend end-to-end — architecture, delivery, and the 3 a.m. pages? That’s the job I like.

Emailalakov.ilia@gmail.com Telegram@i_alakey LinkedInilia-alakov GitHubialakey

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