Curriculum Vitæ · 2026 Algarve · Portugal
Dmytro Strafun

Dmytro Strafun

Software Engineer & Solution Architect
Algarve, Portugal
linkedin.com/in/strafun
github.com/strafun

Summary

Engineering leader with 16 years in software and 8+ years building and running teams. At CheqUp I joined as the first and only developer and grew it into an eight-person team serving 50,000+ subscribers; earlier I led a legacy-to-modern re-platform on a live product that is still running today. Hands-on where it counts (PHP, Node.js, Python, Go), and driving LLM tooling adoption across the team.

Experience

CheqUp·Lead Engineer & Solution Architect
Jun 2024 — Present
Lisbon, Portugal
  • Joined as the first and only developer, with an inherited monolith built for the company’s previous business. Hired the second engineer and built the function from there.
  • Scaled the platform from 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.
  • Own architecture, infrastructure, hiring, mentoring and code quality across an eight-person team; hired a platform engineering team to build monitoring, replication, access controls and test pipelines.
  • Run a Laravel monolith and extracted microservices side by side on GCP — payment and subscription services, PostgreSQL with master–slave replication, wide partner API surface.
  • Led 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
Dec 2023 — Jun 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
  • Built features and documentation for a high-traffic shortener and flow builder.
  • Deep Stripe integration work — billing flows and edge cases at scale.
  • Designed an Elasticsearch pipeline for marketing analytics.
CheqUp·IT Security Analyst & Solution Architect (contract)
Aug 2023 — Oct 2023
Lisbon · Healthcare
  • Led the engineering audit that took the product through DTAC compliance.
  • Delivered a full security report against the OWASP Top 10, including penetration testing.
  • Authored software-quality and Laravel best-practice guidance for the team.
ADDDEV·Founder & CEO
Oct 2020 — May 2023
Lisbon, Portugal
  • Founded and ran an engineering consultancy; owned strategy, P&L, hiring and delivery. Grew the team to 27, restructured to 17, and wound it down when the war made a Kyiv-based operation unviable.
Faria Education Group·Principal Software Development Engineer
May 2019 — May 2023
Lisbon · Education
  • 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. It is 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.
Earlier Experience
Asura·Chief Technology Officer — founding CTO, insurance startup (Indonesia)
Apr 2017 — May 2019
Independent·Senior Developer & Consultant — remote (SG / DE / UA)
Jul 2015 — Apr 2017
Seomarket.ua·Senior Developer & Team Lead — Kyiv
Sep 2014 — Jun 2015
retown.kiev.ua·Senior Developer & Tech Lead — Kyiv
Nov 2013 — Jul 2014
Aiken Interactive·Senior Developer & Tech Lead — Kyiv
Sep 2012 — Sep 2013
Smart Business Solutions·Web Developer — Kyiv
Jan 2009 — Sep 2012

Skills

Languages
PHP · Node.js / TypeScript · Python · Go
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
Team building & hiring · agile delivery · technical strategy

Education

National Technical University of Ukraine — Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
Specialist · Applied Mathematics & Computer Financial Engineering · 2001 – 2007