Who am I?

I am Konstantin Gukov, a software engineer in the broad sense of the word. I’m curious about everything, and happen to have worked with a lot of technologies throughout my career. The large missing part in my hard skills is the front-end, but I hope to pick up some while working on this blog :)

What I do

Mainly I designed, developed and maintained back-end services and APIs.

But at different points in time I also happened to:

  • lead small teams;
  • host interns;
  • give conference talks;
  • set up machine learning pipelines;
  • conduct statistical analysis on Big Data;
  • migrate services from bare metal to the containerized cloud;
  • set up monitoring and alerting;
  • extensively work with both SQL and NoSQL databases, mainly MySQL, Memcached and MongoDB;
  • manually troubleshoot prod services with the close-to-kernel tools like perf and tcpdump , and so on.

My career so far

The last 5.5 years I spent at the rather large companies: Yandex and Google.

At Yandex, I worked in a SWE role for 3.5 years. Most of the time I spent working at Yandex.Flights and on its integration with Yandex.Search. I was super lucky to have just the right colleagues to learn from, just the right projects to grow as an engineer, and a lot of freedom. This let me climb the career ladder very quickly, and I left the company shortly after being promoted to a staff position.

At Google, I worked as an SRE for 2 years. I didn’t code much, but instead wrote and reviewed design documents, was on-call and took care that Google services are uniform and the developers adhere to the best practices. I learned quite a bit about system architecture and cloud design patterns - it was a very useful experience I’m glad I have and I recommend everyone. But ultimately this work, very far from the customer, with strictly internal impact and little room for creativity, didn’t spark joy :)

My next stop is the CSE team at Microsoft - the customer-facing department focused on solving concrete problems in the large industries. A typical CSE project would be autonomous vehicles at car factories, but also there are gems like preventing rhino poaching in South Africa!