Ilya Donkin

I'm a backend engineer and technical leader with over 14 years of hands-on experience designing, building, and scaling high-traffic platforms for international markets.

For the past 5+ years I've been at Red Panda Labs, where I currently serve as Tech Lead and owner of the core backend platform. This platform powers 7 dating applications for iOS and Android, serving over 1 million daily active users across 150+ countries, with 100M+ total installs and 80K+ requests per minute. Our primary markets are the US and LATAM.

My day-to-day involves owning the shared backend that all product teams build on, making architecture decisions, and coordinating with developers across multiple squads through regular technical review sessions. Some of the things I've built and shipped:

— Led the migration from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, where I diagnosed a TCP-level performance issue (Nagle's algorithm causing 5x latency degradation) using tcpdump and strace, and resolved it with TCP_NODELAY tuning and a custom PHP extension patch.

— Replaced a legacy real-time messaging system with Centrifugo (WebSocket-based), now serving production traffic.

— Designed a product analytics platform on ClickHouse handling 60TB+ of data for A/B test analysis, user behavior tracking, and critical metric monitoring.

— Built an internal A/B testing system supporting parallel experiments across countries with dependency-aware configurations.

— Architected a photo resizing and caching module for CDN delivery, optimizing the image pipeline and reducing bandwidth costs.

— Designed the CI/CD pipeline (GitLab CI) with a custom database migration system for high-load environments, including deploy locking mechanisms.

— Implemented automated user data cleanup that significantly reduced storage costs.

— Developed an anti-fraud system, integrated multiple billing systems (Google Play, iOS, web card payments), and built internal Composer packages for cross-team code reuse.

Before Red Panda Labs, I spent nearly 9 years at FS Play (Fotostrana) — a high-load entertainment social network with up to 1M DAU — where I grew from a middle developer to a senior engineer, shipping game mechanics and seasonal services that directly impacted engagement and revenue.

My core stack is PHP (14+ years, expert level), with working knowledge of Go (I've written services like a K8s job orchestration daemon). I work extensively with MySQL, ClickHouse, Redis, Memcached, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Grafana, Prometheus, and Centrifugo.

I'm based in Belgrade, Serbia and I'm looking for full remote Senior Backend Engineer or Tech Lead roles where I can tackle complex scalability challenges and contribute to platform-level architecture decisions.