# Sergey Alekseev **Staff Engineer** · Sydney, Australia · Australian citizen [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/seralexeev/) · [GitHub](https://github.com/seralexeev) · [ser.alexeev@gmail.com](mailto:ser.alexeev@gmail.com) --- ## About 13 years of experience, some of it pleasant. I've worked at big tech — **Mail.Ru, Yandex, Canva, IBM** — and at startups that were considerably more fun. What I'm good at is taking a product from "someone has to run that query by hand" to a system that answers the question itself, at scale, for everyone. I get genuinely excited about **geo, logistics, ecommerce, search and gen AI**. I'm not a fan of rigid roles and corporate process adopted purely because a bigger company does it. I'd rather own a problem end to end and find the simple, smart solution — instead of over-engineering something complicated to justify my salary. ## Skills | | | |---|---| | **Fluent** | LLMs, agents, RAG, semantic search, MCP, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React, React Native, SQL, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, ClickHouse, C#, ASP.NET Core, GraphQL, AWS, Docker, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Orleans, git | | **Comfortable** | Go, Python, Kubernetes, SQL Server, Java | ## Highlights - Started the platform an ecommerce analytics company runs on, and lead its development. - Made AI-powered search and conversational answers a core part of **Dovetail**'s product. - Replaced manual monitoring of a top-50 global website with a system that analyses 100× more signal, and presented it at several IT conferences. - Built the engineering foundations two fast-growing grocery delivery startups ran on — from scratch at **Golamago**, out of a fragmented estate at [**MILKRUN**](https://www.milkrun.com/). - Cut feature time-to-market at **Yandex** from three months to one week by rewriting the platform's core. - Build things nobody asked for: a [React Native cycling app](https://github.com/seralexeev/findmyride) with real users, a [logistics platform](https://www.linkedin.com/company/bunnyfleet) I work on when the mood strikes, and an [autonomous robot](https://xrabbit.dev/) purely for fun. --- ## Experience ### [ProfitPeak](https://profitpeak.io) — Staff Engineer *Sep 2025 – Present* Ecommerce profit analytics. I started the platform the product runs on — **TypeScript**, **PostgreSQL** and **ClickHouse** on **AWS** — and lead its development. - Turned analytics from something customers requested into something they perform: they ask questions of their own data in plain language and get answers, instead of waiting on an analyst. - Put that same capability inside the AI assistants customers already use, over **MCP**, so our analytics show up where they work rather than only in our app. - Made the platform safe to sell upmarket — tenant isolation enforced at the database, role-based access across every surface, and access changes rehearsed against production data before they ship rather than discovered by customers afterwards. - Replaced bespoke reporting with dashboards customers configure themselves, including forecasting that tells them what to do next rather than what already happened. - Connected the systems customers actually run their business on — **Shopify**, **Meta**, **Klaviyo**, **GA4** — so the numbers are complete enough to act on. ### [Dovetail](https://dovetail.com/) — Staff Engineer & Search Lead *Jul 2023 – Sep 2025* Led search, and the shift from finding documents to answering questions. - Made **generative AI** a core part of the product's search rather than a feature bolted onto it, so users get answers with evidence instead of a list of results to read through. - Let people interrogate their research conversationally — follow-up questions, in context, without learning query syntax. - Kept it fast and affordable as it scaled, so relevance improved without the infrastructure bill following it. ### [MILKRUN](https://www.milkrun.com/) — Senior Software Engineer *Jun 2022 – Apr 2023* Full-stack engineer on the platform team, in a company growing faster than its codebase. *I was laid off because the company shut down.* - Consolidated a fragmented estate of projects, stacks and release processes into one platform, making consistency and quality something the whole company could fix at once instead of team by team. - Gave every service a shared, typesafe foundation, so correctness became the default and whole categories of bug stopped reaching production. - Built the internal tooling the operations, support and content teams ran on daily, replacing manual work with a single interface and fine-grained permissions. - Consolidated data scattered across **Firebase**, **MongoDB** and others onto **PostgreSQL** and **PostGIS**, which made the product both faster and easier to reason about. ### [IBM](https://ibm.com/) — Senior Software Engineer *Sep 2021 – Jun 2022* I joined **Envizi**, which IBM acquired a few months later — not what I signed up for. - Delivered an enterprise application that shipped and stuck, in **TypeScript** and **C# / ASP.NET Core** on **SQL Server**. - Modernised the stack and the processes around it while the acquisition happened around us. ### [Canva](https://www.canva.com/) — Software Engineer *May 2021 – Sep 2021* - Worked on the **React** and **TypeScript** design system every Canva product is built from, with a focus on making its components accessible. ### [Yandex N.V.](https://yandex.com/) — Software Engineer *Apr 2018 – Mar 2021* Worked on the platform for building skills for Alice, Yandex's voice assistant, used by millions. - Rewrote the high-load core service from **C++** to **Java**, cutting feature time-to-market from **three months to one week** — the platform could finally ship at the speed the product needed. - Built the skill store that became the front door for the ecosystem, reaching **100,000+ daily active users**. - Made the platform reliable enough to stop being the reason things broke, with monitoring across **100+ business and technical metrics**. ### Golamago — Senior Software Engineer *Jul 2016 – Apr 2018* - Built the backend a grocery delivery startup ran on, from scratch to **1,200+ orders a day**. - Modelled the messy realities of ordering and fulfilment as explicit state machines on **Orleans**, so edge cases became visible rather than expensive. ### [Mail.Ru Group](https://mail.ru) — Software Engineer *Apr 2013 – Jul 2016* Worked on ok.ru, one of the largest social networks in Russia, with 140+ million registered users. - Replaced manual monitoring with a system analysing **5,000 charts every five minutes instead of 50**, removing the human factor and giving the monitoring team their time back. - Built the moderation tooling that cut the manual review load dramatically. --- ## Education ### [Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas](http://en.gubkin.ru) — Master's in Computer Science and Automation *2007 – 2013*