Vadim
Burtelov

Russia's largest digital bank (40M+ customers). Payments team: 5 developers, 3 QA engineers, 16 microservices.

Progression: Intern → Junior- → Junior → Junior+ → Middle (Sep 2025) → Senior (Oct 2026)

• Introduced load testing with Gatling while still an intern, covered 6+ services and trained the team. Found that a legacy payment service degraded at ~100 RPS; after an architecture review and full rebuild, the service handles ~500 RPS on the same hardware (5×).
• Primary QA for the team in E2E testing of the Digital Ruble, Russia's central bank digital currency (CBDC): coordinated with 10+ teams, tested integrations with NSPK and the Bank of Russia, and set up a complex multi-team test environment. Shipped to production; received a company award as the best tester on the project.
• Introduced shift-left practices: requirements testing and Three Amigos sessions before development, followed by test plans, plus mandatory review of automated tests. Own the test strategy, QA roadmap and QA resource planning; review developers' code.
• Built a shared test library adopted by all 16 regression repositories, cutting test framework setup for a new service from 2 days to 3 hours.
• Moved the team from a separate mock environment to component tests (Testcontainers): tests now run in the pipeline right after the build, and QA focuses on scenario design and review.
• Reduced regression pipeline time from 15–20 to 3 minutes with dependency caching. Raised regression stability (3,000+ automated tests) from 65% to 95% by tracking and fixing flaky tests daily.
• Conducted 10+ interviews. Selected and trained a QA intern who now independently handles testing for the team's tasks.