Alexander Savin
Eng/Ru

CV version 2020

Currently looking for a new and exciting opportunity to help with developing your tech stack.

Bulb - London - June 2017 - present

One of the first engineers to be hired into the company. Bulb is an energy provider trying to differentiate from the rest of the competition by investing in its digital products. To help realise this mission from the beginning I was involved in all key products, external and internal.

Worked with both frontend and backend using Node.js / Typescript combo. Heavily used Kubernetes hosted on Google Cloud where we hosted most of our products and cronjobs. Invested in microservice architecture and implemented GraphQL interfaces for our frontend apps.

Leadership

In addition to a senior dev role, I also tech-led teams of various sizes, from 2 to 10 developers. This involved me helping across teams with technical blockers, working with product managers, data science and design to shape products and delivery, writing performance reviews and organising 1-1 catch-ups. I was also in charge of running all agile rituals - daily standups, sprint refinements, retrospectives and sprint plannings.

Most recent project

I've been in charge of technical delivery on Revenue Assurance and Debt Recovery project for the past ~1.5 years. This involved shipping multiple automated backend solutions for detecting cashflow related issues and applying a series of actions to recover lost revenue.

On a practical side, this meant designing and deploying several cloud services and cronjobs, running daily, processing huge amounts of data and dispatching emails, SMS:s, pre-recorded voice calls and actual printed letters (which we rendered using React).

This project involved dealing with the highly sensitive subject of financials, so I had to develop and apply a set of good practices around code quality and QA.

Shadow testing

Pioneered shadow testing techniques for safe production releases in Revenue Assurance project. You can read everything about it in my blog: https://alexsavin.me/eng/posts/2019-10-04-shadow-testing.html

Hiring

Performed hundreds of on-site tech interviews and actively helped in hiring great talent.

Red Badger - London - January 2014 - June 2017

A digital consultancy with an emphasis on modernising tech offerings of its numerous clients. Some of the notable projects I worked on while at Red Badger include:

Tesco

One of the senior devs on the project to deliver brand new online grocery experience across 7 countries on both mobile and desktop. If you ever find yourself on a Polish mobile website, that was me (at some point): https://ezakupy.tesco.pl

I and my team brought React and Node.js, implemented a universal React app that worked with and without JavaScript support (good for feature phones), enabling a continuous integration pipeline and eventually ability to deploy to live multiple times on the same day.

ASOS

https://asos.com

Did a bit of frontend development for the brand new ASOS online shopping experience. React, Node, ES6 and FlowType. Lots of unit tests.

Fortnum & Mason

https://www.fortnumandmason.com/

I was involved as one of the Ruby on Rails devs for the initial implementation of the brand new online experience.

Other notable achievements

React London

Started React London meetup back in 2014 - https://meetup.react.london/ and presented on several occasions at the beginning of the meetup when it was still a small gathering of friends in the basement of our Old Street office.

Later helped to organise React London conference in 2017.

Podcasting

Hosted a tech podcast for several years with a few fellow co-hosts: http://radiobadger.com/

Uni

Got my bachelor's degree in computer engineering at Oulu University, Finland - in 2003. Studies were in Finnish language, however, my diploma was in English - and it was around visualising automated processes on an oil processing plant Fortum where I did my summer training.

Contact