Filonova Mary

Engineering manager

Arctic Code Vault Contributor

About me

I'm an experienced engineering manager and a backend developer. I'm passionate about personal growth, motivation, change management, mentoring and learning new things. I value transparency, honesty, diversity, acceptance and support. As a manager, I cultivate an environment of regular feedback, mutual support, acceptance and trust.

Currently I lead 2 cross functional teams of 10 people: QA department and backend development team. I decide and lead implementation on architecture decisions, technology stack, CI/CD, monitoring, troubleshooting, and testing-related questions. I code and do code reviews.

Tech stack: Python, NodeJS, JavaScript, Unix, etc.

For 15 years, I was a violinist. I supervised an orchestra and organized international tours. I was a good musician, but it wasn’t my thing. Now I do what I am passionate about and can apply my management skills from my past life:)

Skills

Languages

* English (C1, Advanced)

* Russian (C2, Native)

Soft skills

* Ability to lead processes, take responsibility

* Ability to build effective cross-functional communications

* Ability to quickly search for information and understand it

* Result orientation

* Ability to see the big picture and offer several alternatives decisions

Technical

* Python
* JavaScript
* NodeJS
* Unix
* Cloud specifics
* Troubleshooting
* Monitoring
* Automated testing
* Docker
* PostgreSQL, MongoDB
* Kafka, Redis
* Poetry, Pyenv

* People management skills (hiring, training and team development)
* Development team management, incl. distributed
* Project management
* Preparation and formation of TOR
* Setting up the development process according to accepted methodologies
* Product backlog management
* Creation of project architecture, development, code review
* Creation of project architecture, development, code review

Experience

Private aviation: Vista Global

Head of QA: Aug 2023 - now

Engineering manager: Sep 2022 - Aug 2023

Apr 2022 - now

* Improved quality assurance with autotests

Developed and led the creation of automated tests development for several departments. By adding auto tests to CI/CD, we reduced the time of manual quality control. Also, it allowed us to detect errors and critical problems entering production earlier

I led communication between development teams, QA engineers and devops. It was also necessary to establish priorities, implementation order and approve the plan with a senior managers

* Improved quality assurance with monitoring

By adding monitoring and alerts with Datadog and Slack integrations we caught some critical bugs on production that weren't possible to caught during QA on dev.

My role was to communicate with development and devops teams to get all the logs to the Datadog we need. I investigate major issues, conduct RCA, create tickets for dev teams, etc. so we have relevant monitoring and metrics. I also created alerts, dashboards, log-parsers, metrics, etc. In addition, I set up a process of alerts handling, so we won't miss anything critical.

* Knowledge sharing, documentation, test cases

By setting up a process and motivation for documentation writing (confluence, qase) we reduce risks related to a bus factor and improve communication between QA and dev teams.

My team and I write many documentation pages. Also, I set up weekly knowledge sessions where each team member could tell about their team's services, processes, specifics, etc.

* As en engineering manager I improved features' development and implementation speed

By reducing legacy code complexity, improving CI/CD practices and test coverage the time required for development was reduced several times.

I developed a plan on how to achieve desired goal, enlisted the support of developers, approved it with a senior manager. By agreement with the product owner, we allocated 20% of the sprint time to technical debt. We achieved our goal in a half a year, but improvements were noticeable even after the first few sprints

* Hiring, dismissals, layoffs

TL;DR: Sometimes we have to let employees leave. As a manager I decide on hiring, have experience with layoffs and transfer of an employee to another department.

Commercial public cloud: DataFort (Beeline Cloud)

Head of development department

Jan 2021 - Sep 2022

* Build a development department from scratch.

A team of 5 people has been assembled.
I led the hiring process, shaped and facilitated processes of onboarding and adaptation.
We have team building activities, regular 1:1s and feedbacks.

Together we've built CI/CD, we have good-documented code base and knowledge-sharing inside a team.
I facilitate the process of deployment planning, analyze risks and prepare plans to mitigate such.
Each sprint I take 2-3 development tasks, write tests and do code review.

* Implemented SCRUM in the development team.

We have 2 weeks sprints. Each sprint we have retro, refinement and planning activities.

In the result of the SCRUM implementation work processes of the development department have become more transparent and manageable, and the team's self-organization has increased (the team plans the last sprints on its own). Lined up a system of regular increment delivery to business.

* Organized the transfer of two departments work processes from Excel to the CRM system.

I was responsible for the collection and formation of technical specifications, selection of a contractor, contract formalisation, price negotiation.
We were doing the project with an external contractor. So acceptance process, migration and training of departments' employees were my responsibilities too.

In the result of moving to the CRM the work processes of Sales and Presale departments have become more transparent, staff productivity has increased, and the quality of customer service has improved.

* Automated the process of collecting statistics on customer consumption.

When I started to work in the company, collecting statistics on customer consumption was mostly manual.
I collected requirements from the financial and technical departments. Prioritized and approved the procedure for implementing automation. Using the internal development team, we have automated the manual collection of statistics for more than 10 services.

As a result of automation, customers began to receive detailed consumption reportsx. The financial department began to receive more accurate data, and resources were freed up in the technical department. The company's profit grew up.

* Migrated legacy service to new technologies.

There was a service on the python2 without tests and documentation. The developers of this software were not available for contact. The service performed a critical role for the business, about 60% of the company's profit depended on its work.
My team and I migrated the service to new technologies. We wrote documentation, covered it with tests, and split it into services. We made the user interface to reduce the amount of manual work of developers.

As a result of automation, the cost of service support has decreased, monitoring has improved qualitatively. The risks of failures in business-critical functionality have been significantly reduced.

Digital pathology: UNIM

Backend developer

Apr 2020 - Jan 2021

* Single-handedly maintain and develop new functionality for digital pathomorphology system (python, node.js, JS).

Company's product was a platform for diagnosing cancer with a large amount of data (each patient image weighed from 3 to 9 GB). Previous development team left company without any documentation or knowledge transfer. So our team had to accept a service with a load of about five thousand patients per week and with KPI to make a diagnosis - no more than 72 hours. My own responsibility was 3 services responsible for diagnosis. Also we had to quickly migrate from Amazon to our own servers.

As a result the services of my responsibility's area have become more stable (the number of requests from users has decreased by about 60%), there are autotests, documentation, a description of the applied architectural solutions. Also, the delivery of updates to the client for half a year of my development went without any problems.

Outsource agency: Spherical.pm

Backend developer

Sept 2019 - Apr 2020

* Develop web application: Jira quick reporter (python).

There was a team which were doing an opensource project - Jira quick reporter. I was a part of development team. Took a part in architecture decision process.

Result was a ready-made technological solution for speeding up work with Jira. You can find it here.

* Develop web application: language school (python).

Our team's goal was to maintain and develop more features to a language school service.

In a result new features was added into the software.

Outsource agency: TechBoss

Backend developer

Jun 2018 - Sept 2019

* Independently develop a indoor navigation system for a restaurant (python, JS).

The system should help to determining where to carry an order in the restaurant based on the location of the client.

Result was a ready-made technological solution for implementation in a restaurant chain with all the necessary for support and implementation. All done by myself.