Curriculum Vitæ · 2026
Algarve · Portugal
Dmytro Strafun
Engineering Leader & Solution Architect
Summary
Engineering leader with 16 years in software and 8+ years building and running teams. Twice the most senior technical person in a company. At CheqUp I joined as the first and only developer and built the function to an eight-person team reporting to me, serving 50,000+ subscribers. Founding CTO at Asura; ran my own consultancy and its P&L. Hands-on where it counts (PHP, Node.js, Python), and led the team-wide LLM tooling rollout.
Experience
CheqUp·Lead Engineer & Solution Architect
- Joined as the first and only developer, with an inherited monolith built for the company’s previous business. Hired the second engineer, built the function from there, and scaled the platform 0 to 50,000 subscribers in the first year.
- Set the methodology from a blank slate — DDD and TDD, made enforceable through code review standards and CI gates — and introduced the Scrumban process the team runs on.
- Manage an eight-person engineering team — eight direct reports: hiring, 1:1s, performance reviews and progression. Own architecture, infrastructure and code quality, and hired a platform engineering team for monitoring, replication, access control and test pipelines.
- Own the payments and subscriptions platform — a Laravel monolith and extracted microservices side by side on GCP, including a subscription and billing service replacing Stripe’s billing layer, PostgreSQL with master–slave replication, and a wide partner API surface.
- Delivered the team-wide Claude rollout and authored the shared skills that encode our engineering standards, so tooling enforces the standard rather than just accelerating output.
TinyURL·Senior Software Engineer
- Deep Stripe integration work — billing flows and edge cases at scale, on a high-traffic shortener and flow builder.
CheqUp·IT Security Analyst & Solution Architect (contract)
- Led the engineering audit that took the product through DTAC compliance, and delivered a full OWASP Top 10 report with penetration testing.
ADDDEV·Founder & CEO
- Founded and ran an engineering consultancy. Owned the P&L, strategy and delivery, and hired, managed and appraised the team — grew it to 27, restructured to 17, wound it down when the war made a Kyiv operation unviable.
Faria Education Group·Principal Software Development Engineer
- Brought in to fold a legacy PHP/Node.js product into the parent platform. Argued instead for re-platforming onto Laravel + Vue, and led it — incrementally, on a live fee-paying platform, never a cutover. Still actively developed today.
- Migrated the platform to AWS; modernised the SAML-based identity microservice; replaced Zend Job Queue with Laravel queues.
- Introduced TDD across teams and rebuilt the CI/CD pipeline.
Asura·Chief Technology Officer (founding)
- Founding CTO — the most senior technical person in the company. Built the core insurance platform, partner APIs and ten regional sites from zero, leading a team across Singapore, Germany and Ukraine.
- Onboarded enterprise partners — AXA, AIA, Allianz Care — with secure integrations and SLAs, leading those relationships directly. Migrated all infrastructure to AWS and introduced DDD/TDD, event-driven architecture and CI/CD.
Earlier Experience
Independent·Senior Developer & Consultant — remote (SG / DE / UA)
Kyiv·Senior Developer & Tech Lead — Seomarket.ua, retown.kiev.ua, Aiken Interactive, Smart Business Solutions
Skills
Languages
PHP / Laravel · Node.js / TypeScript · Python
Data
PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · MongoDB · Elasticsearch
Cloud / Infra
GCP · AWS — two live-platform migrations delivered · Docker · CI/CD
Architecture
Distributed & event-driven systems · DDD · TDD / BDD · Microservices
Leadership
Line management & performance · hiring · P&L ownership · technical strategy
Education
National Technical University of Ukraine — Kyiv Polytechnic Institute · Applied Mathematics & Computer Financial Engineering · 2001 – 2007