About me

I'm Roman — a senior backend engineer living in New York. I've been writing backend code for 20+ years, almost all of it on the JVM: Java first, Scala for the past decade, Kotlin here and there.

I grew up in Omsk, Siberia, and studied Applied Mathematics at Omsk State University. I moved to the US in the mid-2000s and have been working in New York's financial tech since then. Two decades in one city is a lot; I've come to like the specific flavor of urgency that comes from trading windows, EOD cutoffs and market-open deadlines.

What I work on

Mostly financial platforms: trading data pipelines, treasury risk and funding, reconciliation systems, market-data ETL. The common thread is JVM systems that need to be both fast and correct under real production load — not synthetic benchmarks.

Over the years I've developed a quiet obsession with performance engineering: flame graphs, allocation profilers, cache-hit ratios, GC logs, distributed batch grids that mostly behave and occasionally don't. The most satisfying wins are usually the ones that look obvious in retrospect — someone cached a huge object by a huge key, someone did three DB round-trips where one would do, someone forgot to add an index. Finding these is half archaeology, half detective work.

How I like to work

Small teams. Clear ownership. A tight loop between writing code and seeing it run in production. I'm happiest when the team is small enough that the person who writes the code is also the one who's on call for it — it aligns incentives nicely.

I've led distributed teams (24 engineers in Sofia from NYC) and I've been a single-maintainer of critical systems. The small-team version is more fun; the distributed-leadership version taught me more. Both experiences shaped how I write docs, how I structure on-call rotations, and how I think about making systems legible to the next engineer — because there's always a next engineer, and sometimes it's future-me at 3am.

Outside of work

I play guitar (rock and metal, mostly), hike with a tent when the weather allows, and sink embarrassing amounts of time into CRPGs, survival sims and 4X strategies. I cook — primarily meat, poultry and fish, rarely anything sweet. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy.

I keep a soft spot for slow-burn hobby projects: things I can tinker with on weekends without a deadline. The current one involves local LLM inference and a home lab.

Contact

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn. I don't keep a public email on this site — sorry for the inconvenience, but the signal-to-noise ratio of public inboxes is what it is.