Curriculum Vitæ · 2026
Algarve · Portugal
Dmytro Strafun
Engineering Leader & Solution Architect
Summary
Engineering leader with 16 years in software and 8+ years building and running teams. Tech lead or architect in most of my roles since 2012. At CheqUp I built an engineering team reporting to me and set every process it runs on, serving 50,000+ subscribers. Founding CTO at Asura. Founded and ran my own consultancy: grew it to 27 people led through team leads, and owned its P&L. Hands-on where it counts (PHP, Node.js, Python), and led the team-wide LLM tooling rollout.
Experience
CheqUp·Engineering Lead & Solution Architect
- Built and lead the engineering team — eight direct reports. Run hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews and progression, and hired a platform engineering team for monitoring, replication, access control and test pipelines.
- Set up every engineering process the team works by: DDD and TDD, made enforceable through code review standards and CI gates; the Scrumban process with planning, retros and 1:1s; and the Jira and CI/CD pipelines that delivery runs on.
- Own architecture, infrastructure and code quality. Rebuilt an inherited monolith, made for the company’s previous business, into the platform that grew 0 to 50,000 subscribers in the first year.
- Own the payments and subscriptions platform — a Laravel monolith and extracted microservices side by side on GCP, including a subscription and billing service replacing Stripe’s billing layer, PostgreSQL with master–slave replication, and a wide partner API surface.
- Delivered the team-wide Claude rollout and authored the shared skills that encode our engineering standards, so tooling enforces the standard rather than just accelerating output. Over the last year tickets closed per month rose 136% and PRs merged 150% (+67% per engineer), with the median PR five times bigger.
TinyURL·Senior Software Engineer
- Deep Stripe integration work — billing flows and edge cases at scale, on a high-traffic shortener and flow builder.
CheqUp·IT Security Analyst & Solution Architect (contract)
- Led the engineering audit that took the product through DTAC compliance, and delivered a full OWASP Top 10 report with penetration testing.
ADDDEV·Founder & CEO
- Founded and ran an engineering consultancy. Owned the P&L, strategy and delivery, and hired, managed and appraised the team — grew it to 27 people, led through team leads, restructured to 17, wound it down when the war made a Kyiv operation unviable.
Faria Education Group·Principal Software Development Engineer
- Brought in to fold a legacy PHP/Node.js product into the parent platform. Argued instead for re-platforming onto Laravel + Vue, and led it — incrementally, on a live fee-paying platform, never a cutover. Still actively developed today.
- Migrated the platform to AWS; modernised the SAML-based identity microservice; replaced Zend Job Queue with Laravel queues.
- Introduced TDD across teams and rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline.
Asura·Chief Technology Officer (founding)
- Founding CTO — the most senior technical person in the company. Built the core insurance platform, partner APIs and ten regional sites from zero, leading a team across Singapore, Germany and Ukraine.
- Onboarded enterprise partners — AXA, AIA, Allianz Care — with secure integrations and SLAs, leading those relationships directly. Migrated all infrastructure to AWS and introduced DDD/TDD, event-driven architecture and CI/CD.
Earlier Experience
Independent·Senior Developer & Consultant — remote (SG / DE / UA)
Kyiv·Senior Developer & Tech Lead — Seomarket.ua, retown.kiev.ua, Aiken Interactive, Smart Business Solutions
Skills
Languages
PHP / Laravel · Node.js / TypeScript · Python
Data
PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · MongoDB · Elasticsearch
Cloud / Infra
GCP · AWS — two live-platform migrations delivered · Docker · CI/CD
Architecture
Distributed & event-driven systems · DDD · TDD / BDD · Microservices
Leadership
Line management & performance · hiring · P&L ownership · technical strategy
Education
National Technical University of Ukraine — Kyiv Polytechnic Institute · Applied Mathematics & Computer Financial Engineering · 2001 – 2007