Віталій

Vitaly Lavrenko
Truskavets, Ukraine (Remote)
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Senior Staff Engineer / Engineering Manager
High-Load Distributed Systems • Platform Engineering • AI-Assisted Development

Profile
Hands-on Engineering Manager and Staff-level engineer with 20+ years of experience building and scaling SaaS
platforms in high-load distributed environments.

Strong background in backend architecture, platform engineering, system design, event-driven systems, microservices,
cloud infrastructure, and engineering leadership. Experienced in improving reliability, scaling engineering organizations,
optimizing SDLC processes, and driving technical excellence across multiple teams.

Over the past few years, I have been actively working with AI-assisted engineering practices for software development,
debugging, system analysis, and developer productivity improvements. I gained hands-on experience with LLM-based
tooling, RAG pipelines, graph-oriented workflows, and modern AI coding agents in practical engineering scenarios.

Core Expertise
Architecture & Platform Engineering
- High-load distributed systems
- System design and architecture evolution
- Event-driven architecture
- Microservices and monolith decomposition
- Platform engineering and developer productivity
- Cloud-native and AWS-based systems
- Reliability engineering and observability
Backend & Infrastructure
- PHP, Python, Javascript/Node.js
- REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs
- MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis
- AWS (EC2, RDS, SQS, S3, ELB, CloudFront, ECS)
- Kubernetes and IaC
- CI/CD pipelines and release engineering
- Monitoring and production operations
AI & Data
- AI coding agents
- LangChain and RAG systems
- AI-assisted development workflows
- Graph-oriented workflows
- Parquet-based data processing
- AI-enhanced debugging and code review
- Practical experience with local LLMs and vector embeddings
Payments & Fintech
- Payment systems integrations (Stripe, PayPal, Checkout and other PSP integration)
- Subscription billing and payment workflows
- Refunds, retries, webhook/event handling
- PCI DSS awareness and production risk management
Leadership
- Engineering management and technical leadership
- Team scaling, hiring, mentoring
- SDLC optimization and delivery improvement
- Incident management and operational excellence
- Cross-functional collaboration with Product, QA, Data, and Operations

Professional Experience
Cloudbeds — SaaS Platform (B2B/B2C), Fully Remote
Senior Engineering Manager (Feb 2019 – Sep 2024)
Led 4 engineering teams (~30 engineers) working on high-load distributed SaaS systems serving thousands of
hospitality businesses across global markets.

Worked at the intersection of engineering leadership, platform engineering, backend architecture, reliability, observability,
and delivery execution.

Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Led architecture evolution from monolithic architecture toward domain-oriented distributed services and microservice-
based boundaries
- Owned system design, API design, data modeling, architecture reviews, and service decomposition
- Worked closely with engineers on scalability bottlenecks, production issues, and high-impact technical decisions
- Established engineering standards around reliability, observability, CI/CD, and operational excellence
- Contributed hands-on to debugging, incident response, and critical production changes
Platform Engineering & Infrastructure
- Improved CI/CD pipelines, deployment reliability, and developer workflows
- Worked on AWS infrastructure evolution and Kubernetes-based operational improvements
- Improved observability, monitoring, alerting, and production visibility across distributed systems
- Contributed to multi-island architecture, traffic isolation, and fault-domain separation
High-Load & Event-Driven Systems
- Worked on distributed systems handling large-scale production traffic, asynchronous operational workflows, and
business-critical SaaS operations.
- Improved scalability and fault isolation through asynchronous and event-driven communication patterns
- Participated in production scaling and reliability initiatives across multiple services
Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Reduced production incidents from ~20 to ~5 per cycle
- Improved MTTD from ~5h to ~30 min and MTTR from ~2h to ~10 min
- Improved deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and operational stability
- Maintained ~99.9% uptime through stronger incident management and reliability practices
Security & Compliance
- Identified and mitigated risks related to GDPR, PCI DSS, and production security vulnerabilities
- Improved system-level safeguards, access control, and secure engineering practices
Team Leadership
- Built and scaled Engineering and QA/QE teams
- Hired, mentored, and developed engineers from mid-level to senior/staff level
- Led performance reviews, career development, and technical mentorship
AI-Assisted Engineering
- Used AI-assisted tooling for debugging, development acceleration, architecture exploration, refactoring, and
engineering productivity improvements

Cloudbeds — SaaS Platform (B2B/B2C)
Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead (Jun 2011 – Feb 2019)
Built and scaled core SaaS platform from an early-stage product into a large-scale production system.

Key Contributions
- Designed and implemented core backend architecture, domain model, and business logic
- Built scalable backend services and APIs
- Designed data models and optimized MySQL/PostgreSQL performance for high-load workloads
- Built and operated AWS-based cloud infrastructure
- Introduced CI/CD practices and improved SDLC processes
- Built and maintained production payment integrations with PayPal, Stripe, Checkout, and subscription billing systems
for global SaaS operations
- Owned architecture and development of core financial workflows including Folio management, Tax/Fee processing,
and billing-related services within a high-scale SaaS platform
- Worked with asynchronous processing, queues, retries, and event-driven operational flows
- Mentored engineers and grew team from 5 → 20 developers

Earlier Experience
ICT Software — Technical Lead / Senior Engineer (2008–2011)
Scaled engineering team from 10 → 20 engineers, modernized architecture and engineering stack, delivered systems
across multiple domains and clients.
ITAge Group — Senior Full-stack Engineer (2004–2008)
Built advertising platform and video hosting systems with high-load backend responsibilities.
AlarIT — Head of Web Development (2002–2004)
Led engineering organization of ~15 engineers and delivered multiple web platforms and enterprise systems.
Aval Bank / APConsulting (2001–2002)
Banking systems and enterprise web development.

Tech Stack
Backend & Data:
PHP, Python, Node.js, REST APIs, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis

Cloud & Infrastructure:
AWS (EC2, RDS, ECS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, ELB), Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code
Architecture:
Distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architecture, DDD, monolith decomposition, system design
Observability & Reliability:
Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, PagerDuty
Payments:
Stripe, PayPal, Checkout integrations, subscription billing, webhook processing
AI & Data Systems:
AI-assisted development, code agents, LangChain, RAG workflows, graph-based workflows, Vector DBs

Education
PhD (in progress) — Artificial Intelligence
Zaporizhzhia Polytechnic National University
Specialist & Bachelor — Software Engineering

Languages
Ukrainian — Native
English — Upper-Intermediate