Denis Zhbankov
Software Engineer & Manager
Last update: Jul 04, 2025
Status: Available for new projects
What's next?
2025employment
Software Engineer
Master of Computer Science from #75 Global university, 12 years of experience
Engineering Manager
Master of Business Administration from #30 European business school, 8 years of experience
Interests
Make complicated things simple and ordered, both in tech and in human relations (INTJ-A architect personality type)
Teal management ♡, TypeScript, Serverless, AWS CDK, or whatever else cool modern tech is out there
Financial markets, crypto / web3, physics (especially quantum), psychology
Spacetime
UTC-3: Buenos Aires, Argentina
I also have an H1B visa from EPAM Systems, which can be transferred to another US based company until the middle of 2026
Contacts
Russian C2, English C1, Spanish B2 (actually, it's also certified as C1, but I think the examiners were overly generous)
Filters
200520062007200820092010201120122013201420152016201720182019202020212022202320242025analyticsassessmentbackendconsultingcoursedevopsemploymentfrontendhobbymanagementopen-sourcepublicationqauniversity
Full Stack Engineer
2025backenddevopsfrontendhobbyqa
Fair Launch: Solana token creator that prevents rug pulls and minimizes third‑party fees
IT Consultant
20232024backendconsultingdevops
Hola Revisora: Honest and objective reviews and inspections of businesses in Buenos Aires, Argentina
AWS, CDK, Lambda, Neptune, TypeScript-only monorepo
Chief Tech Officer
20232024backenddevopsemploymentmanagement
MoreAI: Existing alternative investments fund expands its business by presenting an AI-centered wealth management solution for wealthy individuals and family offices and eventually plans to open its doors to retail clients
Employee #1: Lord Shiva with 6 arms
Have raised the project from 0 to 1, now I wish it all the best on a journey from 1 to ∞. Established the 3 pillars of a successful tech company.
Tech: Architected and led a fully serverless, infinitely scalable, modern, and cheap AWS-cloud system from zero to production in half a year. 100% TypeScript highly modular microservice-based monorepo with Backend, DevOps, Frontend, and QA.
Team: Gathered a 100% cross-functional T-shaped team of around 10 bright engineers. Everyone could help everyone else because of the same tools and best practices. People started to create pull requests which covered everything from DevOps deployment, through Backend API and QA autotests, to Frontend forms and pages, all created by one person. Embraced continuous learning and teaching within the team. Attracted extra high-skilled contributors part-time to save on development costs. Countless times received "best team ever" feedback from colleagues.
Process: Organized all operations in IT and most of HR. Established cycles of planning, estimation, work, feedback, and improvement. Which actually proved continuous improvement to be not only existing but also measurable.
Extremely sadly, but unfortunately, this organization lost its initial tealness in a hard and abrupt way. As a result of some political intrigues behind our backs, within a week after we reached production readiness, our main investor, Arseniy Zibarev, suddenly fired the whole team in one day without warning and decided to build something else instead. On top of that, he stole the whole team's salary for the last fully worked month. It was the first time in my life when I was fired by someone else's initiative.
Devops Engineer
2023devopspublication
Medium: AWS CDK / API Gateways / multiple privates behind one public
Full Stack Engineer
2022202320242025backenddevopsfrontendhobbyqa
Balkan Taxi: Almost the same functionality as in Uber, but in Telegram bot: drivers, passengers, live locations, live chats, personal settings, support, etc.
Planeta Taxi: Based on Balkan Taxi, but this time it is powerful enough to work across the globe. I was pleasantly surprised that people still use Balkan Taxi after more than 2 years have passed since the last time I made any update other than updating dependencies. So I decided to advance further while I have a break before the next big project.
Worked flawlessly for almost a year without any modifications, then I started to sometimes upgrade dependencies
AWS, CDK, DynamoDB, Lambda, TypeScript-only
Update: after 2.5 years closed in favor of the new Planeta Taxi
One person vs 30400 employees of Uber, who wins?
AWS, CDK, DynamoDB, Lambda, multi-region automatic deployment, TypeScript-only monorepo
IT Consultant
2021backendconsultingdevopsfrontendqa
Ask CTO: A charity endeavor set up to provide help for those with little to no proficiency in tech
IT Consultant
2021consultingfrontend
Desert Safari, #2: Volunteering to help a tour guide in Dubai who sought assistance because he didn't understand anything about tech
Frontend Engineer → Head of Frontend → Head of Engineering → Chief Tech Officer
20192020202120222023employmentfrontendmanagement
SoftPro: Professional betting tools for VIP clients, including custom trading terminal, market prices aggregator, custom events browser, mobile messenger, etc. Later an online casino with realtime video streaming joined the family.
Odds96, CoreTechs: A recent investment of SoftPro into a proximate business area: an ambitious local startup in international retail betting, aimed at revolutionizing the market and outperforming its competitors with bleeding-edge technological solutions, plans to go live in 2020.
Although from a technological perspective it was a fairly common stack these days (TypeScript, React, Redux, Storybook, Jest, sometimes MobX and a little of Angular), I had my very first but pleasurable encounter with MobX, because while it takes just a fraction of an effort compared to Redux to implement the same feature, it also gives more encapsulation, modularity, and readability, so it brings frontend closer to the proper SOLID principles.
Also, our company has significantly endeavored to improve the overall product delivery process, including phases of focus group interviewing, collecting requirements, thorough analysis, tasks decomposition and assessment, both architectural and UI/UX design, resources planning, automatic and manual testing, CI/CD best practices. The example of managing a fairly large group of people (100+ employees) was especially valuable for me as an MBA student.
At the online casino project, a CTO, a C++ developer, and I worked on an end-to-end low latency video transcoding solution.
A few Figma screenshots of SoftPro are archived by its CPO Alina Morozovskaia for historical purposes on Google Drive.
After my few months working at SoftPro itself, our best backend colleague and I were invited to lead backend and frontend development respectively in this new company with ~20 employees so far, and we plan to hire more. I will continuously apply my knowledge from the ongoing MBA courses to develop the skills of our frontend team while at the same time I will ensure the best frontend practices to be followed.
Technologically speaking, I plan to extensively apply my new experience with MobX, achieved at SoftPro; use dependency injection via InversifyJS; depend on abstract classes and interfaces instead of concrete implementations; prepare the ground for a substantial share of automated testing; apply strictest linter and TypeScript rules; separate the code into a set of loosely coupled modules with strictly defined API and a tiny core to localize changes, achieve predictable cost estimations for new functionality and probably delegate these modules to different people, as I've already done before at SMMplanner. I fully concur with the ideas from "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin.
After 3 months of work we have risen to ~35 employees (6 frontend engineers, mostly seniors), I have implemented my architectural ideas in one project with tens of thousands of legacy code lines and they proved to be extremely valuable for a couple of brand new features.
In the span of the next quarter, we have successfully accomplished a more challenging frontend task of merging with the second big project to share our business entities and logic between them.
Next plan is to further improve business processes, use our current experience to create a foundation for an additional internal system, and finally go live.
In 2020 we opened a business based on cryptocurrencies in Latin America, got our first real clients, and grew to nearly 50 employees, 3 full-stack feature-based development teams (17 engineers).
Now I focus on organizational tasks, internal climate, strategic planning, and hiring new people.
Next goal is to further increase our customer base and improve operational effectiveness via measurable metrics.
Last quarter we've successfully risen to 0.5M unique visitors with 5 figures in the total count of sports bets and casino spins.
My upcoming goals are long-term technical vision and roadmaps, systematization of possibilities and risks, operational improvements.
Our next goal as a company is to reach the break-even point in sales and make it to the next round of funding fully prepared.
Master of Business Administration → Master in General and Strategic Management
2018201920202021university
RANEPA, IBS, MBA: Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Institute of Business Studies
MBA: #30 European business school
GPA 4.94 out of 5 scale
Faculty of Entrepreneurship and Corporate Management
GPA 4.89 out of 5 scale
Frontend Engineer
2017frontendpublication
Medium: Maintaining a fork of create-react-app as an alternative to ejecting
Head of Frontend
201720182019employmentfrontendmanagement
SMMplanner, Pepper Ninja: Automated SMM (social media marketing) tools and services: scheduled posting to multiple social media, advertisement campaigns (audience parsing, targeting), services for technical support
Legacy frontend for the main application: AngularJS, Gulp, Vanilla JS, jQuery.
New frontend for the main application: TypeScript, React, Redux, Sagas, code splitting, full internationalization. The main challenge was to design the new system to be: a) developed and released in little portions; b) highly modular and spread across different programmers with little to no interconnections; c) gradually integrated into the highly coupled and entangled legacy one with dynamic (lazy) loading of code chunks, where every chunk might have custom reducers and sometimes its own middleware.
Completely new service written from scratch featuring web and mobile versions: Lerna, TypeScript, React, React Native, React Context with custom Redux Devtools integration, fair amount of abstraction, monorepo approach with shared REST API, business logic, context (data itself and data manipulations), utilities, language features. All logic is separated, so the app can be easily ported to a different UI system, e.g. desktop.
HTML5 video editor, which allows preview, crop, trim, add and free transform image overlays on a video right in the browser: Ffmpeg (custom build ported with AsmJS), TypeScript, React, Canvas.
Realtime notification service: SSE, Websockets, TypeScript, React, Node, Express, RabbitMQ, Redis.
A tool to mimic Instagram stickers and overlays, which uses quite complex and low-level text measurement, positioning and aligning calculations: TypeScript, Vanilla JS, Canvas.
More libs, e.g. custom UTM management, cookies; more pull requests: Ghost blog, Material colors, Angular intro, etc.
Frontend Engineer
2017frontendopen-source
Kubernator: Kubernator is an alternative Kubernetes UI. In contrast to high-level Kubernetes Dashboard, it provides low-level control and a clean view on all objects in a cluster with the ability to create new ones, edit and resolve conflicts. As an entirely client-side app (like kubectl), it doesn't require any backend except Kubernetes API server itself, and also respects the cluster's access control.
478 stars, 37 forks, 3 contributors
React, Redux, Sagas, Kubernetes
Update: the tool is being actively used in our company for almost 2 years now without updates and any frontend issues
Frontend Engineer
2017employmentfrontend
JobRu, IRR, Pronto Media: The holding owned a few popular job search and general classified ads websites in Russia. Unfortunately, it went bankrupt.
Legacy and partially new frontend for the classified ads board: jQuery, Vanilla JS, ExtJS, PHP templates, then we entered React, Redux, Webpack.
The legacy code survived a few transfers between different teams and contractors, including foreign ones. Discussions were very limited and nobody really cared about quality until the main investor got tired of losing money and decided to give it the last try. They started to hire smart people, but the task of reviving the system was really challenging. Indeed, we had made decent progress, but the additional investments ran dry nonetheless.
Frontend Engineer
2017assessmentfrontend
SO Developer Story: HTML5 99th percentile, JavaScript 98th percentile, React 97th percentile, CSS: 97th percentile
Frontend Engineer
2016frontendopen-source
Angular Evaporate: AngularJS module for the EvaporateJS library (uploading files in chunks to Amazon S3 with pause/resume), with a complete example. Reinforces the EvaporateJS library to allow AngularJS-specific usage along with all the native functionality plus additional features.
27 stars, 15 forks, 4 contributors
Backend Engineer
2016backendopen-source
Sticky Cluster: In NodeJS cluster environment SocketIO requires you to use sticky sessions, to ensure that a given client hits the same process every time, otherwise its handshake mechanism won't work properly. To accomplish that, manuals suggest the sticky-session module. My module is based on the same principles as sticky-session, but utilizes a more efficient hash function and also works asynchronously out of the box.
109 stars, 26 forks, 2 contributors
Up to 10x faster than sticky-session
Much better scattering over the worker processes than that of sticky-session
Asynchronous out of the box, just run a callback when you're done initializing everything else
Works correctly with IPv6
Full Stack Engineer
20152016backenddevopsfrontendhobbyqa
Option Toolbox: Online risk assessment and hedging toolbox for options traders on US stock exchanges. Initially created for myself as a much more user-friendly and functional replacement of broker's software, but exposed to the public later. The project was under active development when I was using it almost every day to manage my own portfolio. Also has a blog, where I had occasionally posted some relevant thoughts and ideas.
Fully interactive mobile-friendly 2D (SVG) and 3D (WebGL) charts
Black-Scholes financial model calculations done with my own open-source AngularJS module
Delayed financial data from Google and Yahoo
Realtime market quotes from the local Interactive Brokers' terminal through SocketIO
AngularJS, NodeJS, Heroku
Full Stack Engineer
20142015backenddevopsfrontendhobbyqa
Private Ads: Classified advertisements' place with additional features, intended to level up the usefulness of service. The project is currently turned off as a consequence of the time and advertisement budget underestimation. I thought it would be possible to run a full service by myself, I was wrong.
Introduced flexible user-defined tags instead of predefined classification (tag relations and weights are stored in a graph database for handy search and suggesting)
Ability to add a desired map area to the search criteria (e.g. to find nearest offers)
Full i18n, live FX exchange quotes and UI translation on the fly
AngularJS, NodeJS, Neo4j, Heroku, Google Maps
Full Stack Engineer
2014201520162017backenddevopsfrontendhobbyqa
Gigman: New way of concert organization which delivers low-cost tickets. Instead of the usual fixed price, customers would get a market exchange-like service. Sadly, the project was postponed a few times in spite of 100% technical readiness, has experienced a vast number of organizational issues, and now is frozen.
Being a founding engineer, I designed and implemented everything by myself.
Truly realtime market via SocketIO and PostgreSQL notifications.
Backend on Heroku, Amazon S3, Godaddy, PostgreSQL, Redis, TypeScript, Node, Express. All business logic is fully covered with tests and implemented via (fairly complex) DB procedures with transactions, SQL/PLSQL part alone is ~5000 LOC, the rest backend is rather thin and scales mostly to handle concurrent websocket connections.
Frontend utilizes AngularJS, Gulp, ESLint and is fully responsive from mobile to large desktops.
More than 550 unit and integration tests (including multiple OAuth-authorized users trading assets and communicating through SocketIO), done in several browsers through Mocha, Chai, Superagent, Protractor, Selenium, Karma.
Also, everything (migrations, backend, frontend, tests) is decoupled and placed in different packages inside a mono repository.
Business Analyst
2012analyticscourse
EDU-SS-01: Domain modelling for creating business regulation documents and technical requirements
Business Analyst → Backend Engineer
2011201220132014analyticsbackendemployment
Trading System Administrator: TSA runs the wholesale market of electric power in Russia (roughly similar business to stock exchanges)
Pioneered a move forward from the extremely outdated IDEF (Integration DEFinition) notation and tools to UML (Unified Modeling Language) and BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), which eventually was accepted as a company-wide standard
Refactored from scratch a number of internal systems of business processes
Generally created or modified the internal proprietary subsystems to align with new government or market regulations
Adapted a primary internal backend framework for a modern Java and Oracle: moved forward a few major versions, nobody else wanted to do this
Proposed and started to use frontend frameworks instead of primitive JS or at best jQuery
Complimented for the best UI among new internal projects
Outside of work created for business analysts a friendly wrapper around Jira (which was also extremely outdated) with extra functionality
Backend worked on Java and Oracle PLSQL, while frontend was usually written in Vanilla JS or jQuery, later I started using Knockout and then Angular
Academic Researcher
2010publication
ResearchGate: Scenario-Based Approach to Backtesting Trading Systems
World Finance Conference, Viana do Castelo, Portugal
Specialist in Mathematics and System Programming → Specialist in Information Security
2005200620072008200920102011university
MSU, CMC: Lomonosov Moscow State University, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
MSU, MT: Lomonosov Moscow State University, Military Training Faculty
#75 Global university
GPA 4.47 out of 5 scale
Automated trading software C++, machine graphics C#, linguistic neural networks C#