Alexandr Protasenya

Summary

Senior software engineer at the intersection of Python backend, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps. I design scalable systems, automate the platform around them, and own them in production — API design, database evolution, AWS automation with Terraform, and CI/CD that engineers actually want to use. Production-minded: cost, reliability, and on-call ergonomics are first-class concerns.

Highlights

• Designed and operated multi-service Python backends (FastAPI, Django, Celery) on AWS ECS Fargate with Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Owned PostgreSQL in production — logical replication with pglogical, materialized view pipelines, lock and deadlock investigations, concurrency-safe Alembic migrations.
• Built and maintained Terraform-managed AWS infrastructure (ECS, ALB, WAF, IAM Identity Center, CloudWatch) and the CI/CD around it.
• Implemented OIDC / OAuth2 integrations with IAM Identity Center, NextAuth, and Zitadel; debugged distributed auth across federated providers.
• Led architectural decisions on async Python, replication topology, and platform standardisation across services.
• Integrated AI-assisted coding workflows (Claude Code, coding agents, MCP) into the team's daily engineering loop.

Backend engineering

• Async-first Python services with FastAPI and Django, focused on non-blocking I/O and clean service-layer boundaries.
• GraphQL APIs with Strawberry and SQLModel; REST and gRPC where they fit better.
• Domain modelling, DTOs, RBAC, rate limiting, and durable background work with Celery.

Cloud & platform

• AWS production workloads on ECS Fargate behind ALB and WAF, with CloudWatch-based observability.
• Terraform across the full stack: networking, compute, data, IAM. Drift management and state hygiene included.
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, containerised builds, Kubernetes deployments via Helm.
• Secure networking with WireGuard, SSH ProxyJump, and private service tunnelling.

Data & PostgreSQL

• Schema design, indexing, query optimisation, and materialised view strategies for analytics and transactional workloads.
• Logical replication with pglogical, replication set management, and zero-downtime migration playbooks.
• Alembic migration lifecycle — squashing, concurrency-safe DDL, enum and table renames.

Auth & security

• OIDC / OAuth2 integrations with IAM Identity Center, NextAuth, and Zitadel.
• Token, session, and state debugging across federated identity providers.
• AWS WAF rules and platform-level security hardening.

Stack