Nikita Pogoraev

I’m a QA Lead / Senior QA Automation Engineer with 7+ years of experience building scalable test automation and improving release quality in high-load product environments. I bring a strong hands-on background in Python automation, API and integration testing, CI/CD, performance testing, and AI/LLM quality engineering across telecom, digital services, and enterprise software.

I’ve led and built QA teams from scratch, owning QA strategy, quality metrics, and KPI alignment with product and engineering leadership. I’ve increased automation coverage by 25%, reduced production defects by 31%, and cut lead time by 27%, while reaching 75%+ automation coverage across multiple product teams and reducing manual testing effort by 1,000+ hours per year.

I design end-to-end and integration testing strategies for distributed systems, using frameworks and standards that raise engineering productivity. I’ve implemented REST, SOAP, gRPC, WebSockets, and GraphQL test coverage, and built performance testing and nightly post-deploy validation using Locust, Pytest, and production-grade observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.

I also drive defect prevention and risk-based testing with reliability-focused tooling like WireMock and pytest-xdist to improve integration stability (to ~95%) and accelerate regressions (up to 4x). Through AI/LLM-assisted testing, I optimize test design, defect analysis, and automation pipelines—while keeping QA delivery Agile, OKR-driven, and centered on mentoring and stakeholder communication.