Andrei Subbota

Senior Backend Engineer

subbota@gmail.com +46 791 014909 · Stockholm, Sweden github.com/numbata linkedin.com/in/andreisubbota

Summary

Senior Backend Engineer with 13+ years of Ruby expertise, currently at Mentimeter — a presentation platform used by millions worldwide. Focused on scalable architecture, API design, and performance; known for driving complex cross-team migrations, building shared tooling, and raising engineering standards through mentorship and code review.

Work Experience

Oct 2021
Present

Mentimeter (opens in new tab) · Senior Backend Engineer

Stockholm, Sweden · On-site

Operate across multiple product teams for a platform serving millions of users worldwide.
Core contributor to the company's largest domain model migration, driving backend implementation and coordinating safely across every engineering team.
Improved platform observability by building DataDog dashboards and extending OpenTelemetry distributed tracing coverage across backend services running on AWS.
Built and maintained an in-house API framework based on Grape, adopted across all product teams to standardize API patterns, reduce boilerplate, and enforce quality gates via GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines.
Provide fast, thorough code reviews that demonstrably improve quality organization-wide; mentor engineers across teams and champion backend best practices.
Broadened scope beyond backend — contributing TypeScript and React features as part of cross-functional product delivery.

Oct 2017
Sep 2021

Servers.com (opens in new tab) · Backend Developer

Limassol, Cyprus · On-site · Global bare-metal cloud infrastructure provider

Built a hardware provisioning microservice that automated the full server bootstrapping pipeline end-to-end, eliminating manual provisioning steps and enabling faster hardware delivery at scale.
Refactored critical legacy Ruby services, resolving long-standing reliability issues and significantly reducing operational overhead for on-call engineers.
Optimized PostgreSQL query performance across multiple internal services through query analysis, index tuning, and schema improvements.

2010
2017

Earlier Experience

RestreamTechnical Lead · 2015 – 2017

Led Ruby on Rails development across multiple products: a chess tournament portal with real-time and historical broadcast streaming, a TV broadcast analytics system, and a home CCTV platform with a client-facing mobile app. Containerized services with Docker, conducted technical interviews and architectural reviews.

Undev.ruTeam Lead & Backend Engineer · 2012 – 2014

Upgraded 10+ Ruby/Rails codebases from legacy versions (1.8.7 → 2.x, Rails 2/3 → 4); migrated databases from MySQL and MongoDB to PostgreSQL; increased test coverage with RSpec, Minitest, and Capybara; automated deployments with Capistrano and Ansible.

ParcsisLead Software Engineer · 2010 – 2012

Built a high-load legal documents platform with data mining and natural language processing features.

Languages & Technologies

RubyRuby, Ruby on Rails, Grape, Dry-rb, RSpec, Minitest, Capybara

DatabasesPostgreSQL, MySQL

InfrastructureAWS, Vercel, Docker, Nginx, Capistrano, Ansible

MessagingRabbitMQ, Kafka

ObservabilityDataDog, OpenTelemetry

PracticesDomain-driven design, event-driven architecture, microservices, CI/CD

JavaScriptTypeScript, React

Open Source

grape-oas (opens in new tab) — Author and maintainer of an OpenAPI 2.0/3.0/3.1 generator for Grape APIs; features a four-layer test suite (unit, integration, e2e, schema validation), active CI via GitHub Actions, and is used in production at Mentimeter.
Ruby Grape (opens in new tab) — Fixed critical bugs in parameter validation, error handling, and route generation; maintains the library as a daily user at Mentimeter, including GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline ownership across the grape-* repos.
Grape-Swagger (opens in new tab) & Grape-Swagger-Entity (opens in new tab) — Enhanced OpenAPI documentation by refining request body schemas and enabling custom extension metadata.
Ruby on Rails (opens in new tab) — Patched ActiveRecord to support autosave callbacks in STI, ensuring correct handling of nested attributes.
Sequel (opens in new tab) — Optimized unique validations to reduce unnecessary database queries.
Other: RuboCop-Sequel (opens in new tab), SuperDiff (opens in new tab), Capistrano DB Tasks (opens in new tab).

Education

2006

BSc in Mathematics — Samara State University
Thesis: Application of the Metric Model in Text Processing