Alex GoncharovSenior backend developer
Profile picture missing
Professional Experience

Senior backend developer

Reef Technologies⁠
2020 – present | Poland

Contract-based software development for multiple international clients (USA, Australia, Europe)

Lead backend developer

Alternative Data Group⁠
2018 – 2020 | USA

Unstructured data scraping, processing, and delivery via APIs

Fullstack developer (freelance)

Upwork⁠
2017 – 2018 | USA

Contract development for dozens of clients across various industries

Fullstack developer

Green Ship⁠
2010 – 2017 | Russia

E-commerce platform development and ongoing support

Education

Master of Science | Information Technology

Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU)
2009 – 2012 | Moscow, Russia
Awards
Skills
Backend

15+ years of commercial experience with Python; proficient in Django, Django REST Framework (DRF), Celery, FastAPI, and related technologies

Frontend

Primarily a backend-focused engineer with solid frontend experience, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and modern frameworks

Devops

Hands-on experience with DevOps practices, including CI/​CD pipeline design and maintenance, containerization with Docker and Docker Compose, and infrastructure provisioning using Terraform

Remote work

Highly experienced in fully remote work, with strong self-organization, autonomy, and reliability developed through long-term remote collaboration

Past projects

Real estate website scraping

Objective:

Scrape a major US real estate website, store initial and incremental data in a database, and expose it via an API.

Challenges:

  • •~300M property records produced a multi-terabyte dataset; optimized performance through careful indexing, selective denormalization, and Elasticsearch-backed search.
  • •Frequent internal API changes were detected early via schema validation; a dead-letter queue prevented data loss.
  • •Built a reliable scraping pipeline with Celery, including auto-retries, backoff, and smart task scheduling.

    • Backblaze is a publicly traded company offering B2, an AWS-compatible cloud storage service. Contributed bug fixes and feature improvements to the Python SDK and command-line tool.

    Challenges:

  • •As B2 is a primary customer-facing interface, the project required comprehensive test coverage across all changes.
  • •Implemented strict backward compatibility using ApiVer concept, enabling seamless upgrades without breaking existing installations.

    • Medical device integration

    Objective:

    Provide full technical support for a startup by ingesting data from medical devices, exposing it via an API, and continuously delivering new business-driven features.

    Challenges:

  • •Improved performance by deeply analyzing the medical device protocol and reverse-engineering the binary data format.
  • •Handled high-volume, high-frequency data streams by implementing efficient ingestion pipelines and tiered storage, offloading infrequently accessed data to cloud storage with on-demand retrieval.

    • Publications

    Python is great, but here I discuss what is not great in python

    Alex Goncharov, [email protected]
    1 / 2
    Organisations

    Podlodka Python Crew⁠

    Member of the Program Committee
    2024 – 2025

    Habr.com⁠

    Top tech writer & collaborator
    Public talks

    It is not easy!⁠

    "PythoNN" conference
    2024 | Nizhny Novgorod, Russia

    Standup-style talk about quirks and difficulties in everyday programming.

    Clean code: antipatterns in python, and how to deal with them

    2024 | Ekaterinburg, Russia

    Going through most common antipatterns in top opensource libraries and figuring out best tools and practices to make code better

    2023 | Moscow, Russia

    Providing an overview of different Python implementations and potential replacements

    2022 | Tomsk, Russia

    Discussing common mistakes in Python code and strategies to avoid them

    Tags

    Python • Django • DRF • Flask • FastApi • Celery • pytest • scraping • Scrapy • async • HTML • CSS • JS • Bootstrap • SQL • PostgreSQL • MySQL • Redis • Elasticsearch • Prometheus • Grafana • nginx • traefik • Docker • Docker Compose • Terraform • CI/​CD • AWS • GCP • LLM (litellm, openai, ollama) • AI • ML (machine learning) • Git • Github • Gitlab • MVC • Clean code

    Alex Goncharov, [email protected]
    2 / 2