Profile photo of Nikolay Pakudin

I/E Nikolay Pakudin

Senior Ruby / Backend Engineer · Node.js · Python · Distributed Systems

nikolay.pakudin@gmail.com  •  github.com/npakudin

Remote · Georgia (GMT+4) 11k RPS systems Cost ↓ 30% (AWS RDS) Prod firefighting

Summary

I can make your webapp faster, more reliable and fault tolerant Backend engineer with 15+ years building and operating high‑load systems (Rails, Node.js, Python). Comfortable with event‑driven architectures, async I/O, Kafka/RabbitMQ, and PostgreSQL tuning. Known for rapid incident response (e.g., fixed a TimescaleDB crash loop within 4 hours by tracing it to an OS‑level cgroup memory cap in Kubernetes).

Experience

Fin tech — Ruby on Rails Developer

2023 — present
  • Built and maintained services with Ruby on Rails (dry‑rb), Kafka, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes (k8s), Helm.
  • Delivered 11k RPS on RoR + Postgres + Kafka; improved observability and stability.

Smartlead — AI Developer

2024 — 2025
  • Shipped a WhatsApp chatbot for internal Q&A (Node.js, React, OpenAI API, LangGraph).
  • Designed AI workflow orchestration; deployed on Kubernetes with queues for scaling.

Out of Office — Elixir Developer

2023 — 2024
  • Travel app: Elixir, AWS RDS Postgres, Kubernetes.
  • Reduced AWS RDS spend by ~30% via query/index tuning and container limits review.

Hill30 — Full‑stack / Systems Engineer

2011 — 2022
  • Swingbyte — Golf training app + sync server (Android, RoR, PostgreSQL, S3).
  • GemCMS — CMS (React, Elixir, PostgreSQL).
  • NetAnalyzer — DPI analyzer (C/C++, Linux, .NET Core): filtered 99.9% of packets at C++ level; streamed ~0.1% into Kafka and processed with Spark; sustained 10 Gbit/s.

Scout — C# Developer

2010 — 2011
  • ScoutSystem — GPS tracking (C#, MS SQL, high‑performance TCP).

Selected Projects & Wins

Fintech KYC Platform

Rails · Python · Kafka · PostgreSQL · K8s
  • Split a monolith into microservices; Kafka event flows, JWT with Vault key rotation.
  • Automated onboarding — manual setup time went from a full day to near zero.

AI Assistant (WhatsApp)

FastAPI · LangChain · RabbitMQ · K8s
  • Answered internal questions from docs; async workers for load spikes.
  • Learned edge cases of async I/O under real traffic.

Infra Tools

Go · asyncio · gRPC
  • Go daemons for metrics/backups; optimized aiohttp server (~2M req/day).
  • Added graceful shutdowns and retries to minimize deploy incidents.

High‑Load DPI Analyzer

C++ · PF_RING · gRPC
  • 10+ Gbit/s live traffic; kernel‑level filtering; streaming to Kafka/Spark.
  • Fixed TimescaleDB crash loops in under 4 hours (root cause: cgroup memory limit).
  • Cut AWS costs by ~30% via DB/infra tuning.
  • Mentored juniors; two moved from QA to backend roles.