Andrei Subbota
Senior Backend Engineer
Summary
Senior Backend Engineer with 13+ years of Ruby expertise, currently at Mentimeter (interactive presentation platform with 500M+ users). Active Open Source maintainer and contributor to core Ruby/Rails ecosystems — with thousands of combined GitHub stars across the Grape and Rails projects. 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
Mentimeter (opens in new tab) · Senior Backend Engineer
High-load interactive presentation platform supporting real-time audience engagement for 500M+ users
- Spearheaded the largest domain model migration in company history, orchestrating a zero-downtime execution across 10+ engineering teams, while preserving full service continuity without a single integration incident.
- Designed and developed an in-house API framework built on Grape that achieved 100% adoption across all product teams, establishing clear code ownership boundaries, enforcing zones of responsibility, and eliminating cross-team boilerplate at scale.
- Leveraged the declarative structure of the framework to auto-generate OpenAPI specifications, systematically closing the integration gap between frontend and backend teams and reducing cross-functional delivery friction across the engineering org.
- Extended OpenTelemetry instrumentation and built comprehensive DataDog dashboards across AWS backend services, raising platform observability standards and strengthening production resilience.
- Championed backend engineering excellence through high-signal code reviews and cross-team mentorship, raising the collective quality bar across multiple squads in a 10+ team engineering organization.
- Delivered end-to-end features as a fullstack contributor, authoring TypeScript and React code within cross-functional teams to unblock product delivery without sacrificing backend standards.
Servers.com (opens in new tab) · Backend Developer
Global bare-metal cloud infrastructure provider operating across ~20 data centers worldwide
- Architected and executed a comprehensive refactoring of a legacy proof-of-concept hardware provisioning system (PXE-worker) that managed automated bare-metal server bootstrapping globally.
- Designed and delivered a real-time infrastructure management subsystem, introducing a centralized GUI, detailed state tracking, live log streaming, and precise ETA estimation for physical server deployment across all global zones.
Earlier Experience
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.
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.
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 the OpenAPI 2.0/3.0/3.1 generator for Grape APIs; features a four-layer test suite and active CI/CD, heavily adopted in production at Mentimeter to serve 500M+ users.
- Ruby Grape (★ 9.9k+) (opens in new tab) — Core maintainer of the ecosystem; fixed critical bugs in parameter validation and error handling, owning GitHub Actions pipelines across grape-* repositories.
- Grape-Swagger (★ 1.1k+) (opens in new tab) — Active contributor; enhanced OpenAPI documentation by refining request body schemas and enabling custom extension metadata.
- SuperDiff (★ 1k+) (opens in new tab) — Active contributor; enhanced test suite reliability and diffing capabilities for complex Ruby data structures.
- Ruby on Rails (★ 58k+) (opens in new tab) — Contributor; patched ActiveRecord to support autosave callbacks in STI, ensuring correct handling of nested attributes.
- Sequel (★ 5k+) (opens in new tab) — Contributor; optimized unique validations to reduce unnecessary database queries.
- Other: RuboCop-Sequel (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
Thesis: Application of the Metric Model in Text Processing
Languages
- English — Professional working proficiency