Denis Lipatov

Experience

1. 2026

   VotaWallet

   Founder, solo engineerpersonal finance

   Empty repo to production in 27 days; 6 product surfaces; MCP server for AI assistants.

2. 2022 - 2026

   GrowFood

   Senior Backend Engineer, led the R&D direction inside the dev teamfood delivery

   Meal-delivery platform, 1.7M+ users since launch (company figure); Laravel monolith; ~20 developers.

   Stack: PHP 8.0 to 8.2, Laravel 8/9, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes (images, Helm values), GitLab CI, Grafana, Sentry, Datadog APM, Telescope, Jira Cloud API, Vue 2, PHPUnit, PHPStan.

   Integrations

   • Built the Kuper (Sbermarket) integration: partner API, delivery slots, price plans, rolled out to a dozen cities.
   • Added Magnit on the same order model in under six weeks, without rewriting the first integration.

   Platform & performance

   • Upgraded the monolith to PHP 8.2 and Laravel 9 behind the test suite, replacing end-of-life dependencies.
   • Made many routes up to twice as fast by cutting over-fetching, N+1 and duplicate queries.
   • Main developer of the internal HelpDesk and its two-way Jira integration: status, priority and comments sync both ways; staff stay in Telegram, IT works in Jira.
   • Maintained GitLab CI: PHPUnit runs, review environments per branch, Docker and Kubernetes images.

   AI & automation

   • LLM in production since 2023: a model routes incidents to sysadmins on its own and is retrained on its mistakes; image classification in Python; support bots.
   • AI-assisted development with Claude Code: Spec Kit, MCP servers, agent rules; generated code passes tests before merge.

3. 2021 - 2022

   Alyce

   Senior Laravel DeveloperB2B gifting SaaS, Boston, Series B

   B2B corporate-gifting SaaS, Series B, later acquired by Sendoso.

   • Extended a large production Laravel codebase: new functionality, architecture decisions, legacy maintenance; daily work in English with a US team; internal talks on the Laravel ecosystem.

4. 2019 - 2021

   Matetech

   Senior PHP Developeredtech

   • Launched matetech.ru from zero, designed the database and the architecture: a multi-tenant learning platform on Laravel Policies, Notifications and Resource APIs.
   • Built a code generator for repetitive layers; introduced git-flow, DevOps practice and planning meetings.

5. 2017 - 2019

   Media Target / pushex.io

   Backend Developerpush notifications, VPN API

   • Built pushex.io from the ground up on Laravel with Go microservices and a custom worker model for personalised push delivery; owned the rusvpn.com API and payment-adjacent APIs.
   • Recruited engineers, wrote the team's documentation and set up git-flow.

6. 2017

   TriLan / diler.ru

   Backend Developer, freelanceautomotive catalog

   • Built diler.ru (automotive catalogue) on Laravel 5.5 with a Vue front-end and a universal catalogue parser a non-technical manager configured, so the catalogue stayed current without developer time.

7. 2016 - 2017

   legko.com

   Laravel Developerdesign services

   • Built and launched legko.com from scratch on Laravel with a Vue front-end: architecture, admin and user areas, blog, tests; about 80% of the codebase.

8. 2015 - 2016

   Svetets

   Project Managerweb and design projects

   • Ran web and design projects end to end: planning, freelancers and the in-house team, client work.

9. 2012 - 2015

   NRNU MEPhI Engineering Center, Dance11, NeedHelp, Logrus.ru

   Android developer, PHP developer, PMearly roles

   • Lead Web Developer (Dance11); Lead Developer / Project Manager (NeedHelp and Proryv: assembled and tested three dev teams); Android Developer (MEPhI Engineering Center).

Built from an empty repository

• legko.com2016design services
• diler.ru2017automotive catalog
• pushex.io2017 - 2019push notifications
• matetech.ru2019edtech
• VotaWallet2026personal finance

Stack

Backend

PHP 8.4, Laravel, Octane, Horizon, Filament, REST + OpenAPI, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, ClickHouse, Pest, PHPStan, Go (microservices), Python (FastAPI)

AI

LLM features in production, MCP servers (author and consumer), Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, spec-driven development, cross-model review, local STT and embeddings

Frontend and mobile

Vue 3 (since 2016), Nuxt 4, Vuetify, Pinia, TypeScript, Capacitor (Android, iOS), PWA, Vitest

Cloud and ops

Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL), Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, keyless CI, Grafana, Sentry, Datadog, Cloudflare Pages

Practice

integration gateways with versioned adapters, multi-tenancy, p90 first, then profiler, then EXPLAIN, Telegram bots (Nutgram), hiring and mentoring