Alexander Kolesen

IT Infrastructure & Service Architect

Summary

IT Infrastructure and Service Architect with 15+ years of experience designing, implementing, and operating cloud infrastructure for high-load, business-critical systems. Scaled web systems to 1M+ concurrent users and a ride-hailing backend to 40K daily trips; built continuous delivery for 100+ microservices sustaining 600 deploys per day. Seven years running an independent practice for game studios, fintech, and public-sector clients across Europe and the US. Deep hands-on expertise in AWS, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, CI/CD, PostgreSQL and MySQL. Experienced in translating business requirements into technical solutions and coordinating external vendors and distributed engineering teams.

Core Skills

Cloud & Infrastructure
AWSEC2ECS LambdaRDSS3 SQSAPI GatewayKinesis DynamoDBCloudWatchCloudFront ElastiCacheRoute 53GameLift BatchLinuxDocker Kubernetesnginx
IaC & DevOps
TerraformAtlantisGitHub Actions GoCDCI/CDCapacity planning Fault tolerancePrometheusGrafana Kibana
Databases
PostgreSQLMySQL/InnoDBMongoDB DynamoDBSnowflakeElasticsearch
Architecture & Service Management
Requirements gathering and solution design for business needs, service ownership and production readiness, incident and change management, vendor evaluation and coordination, stakeholder communication, team leadership.
Programming
PythonClojureGolang Java/KotlinCC++

Work Experience

Independent Infrastructure & Platform Consultant

2019 β€” present

Warsaw, PL (remote)

Long-form engagements for five clients across AAA gaming, networking, health-tech, public sector, and consumer mobile, plus an own cloud-orchestration product. Typical engagement: 1–2 years, embedded, owning platform architecture end to end.

Principal Infrastructure Engineer & Senior Software Developer

2015 β€” 2018

Juno β€” NYC ride-sharing service, acquired by Gett Β· onsite in Minsk, BY

  • Scaled from a fresh team to 40K daily trips in under one year in the highly competitive NYC market, serving millions of users.
  • Established continuous delivery of 100+ backend microservices, running several times a day and sometimes exceeding 600 deploys daily.
  • Worked on capacity planning and fault tolerance, isolating parts of the computing cluster into separate shards.
  • Led a team of 5 infrastructure engineers serving 40 core backend engineers and 15 QA engineers.
  • Provided developers with tooling to inspect production logs and metrics and to maintain their own alert sets.

Stack: Linux, Clojure, Golang, Python, MySQL/InnoDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, GoCD, nginx, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Prometheus, Grafana, AWS (EC2, ECS, RDS, S3, ElastiCache, Route 53)

Earlier β€” Infrastructure & Backend Engineering

2007 β€” 2015

Wargaming.net Β· Kontur Β· Dyn (via EPAM) Β· Iron.io

  • Wargaming.net (World of Tanks) β€” built deployment tooling and the web infrastructure team; scaled web systems to 1M+ concurrent players across 5 regions (RU, EU, US, CNΓ—2).
  • Kontur, Inc. (GIS service provider) β€” built backend infrastructure for Kontur Platform Services (Kubernetes, Java, nginx).
  • Dyn Inc. (DNS, via EPAM, acquired by Oracle) β€” designed an API bridging legacy and new DNS systems; built Docker + Chef + Jenkins pipelines.
  • Iron.io (cloud platform) β€” migrated MongoDB clusters, automated monitoring, extended deployment infrastructure.

Education

M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence / Information System Security

2004 β€” 2009

Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics β€” Faculty of Information Systems and Management

Master's thesis: β€œIntellectual collection and analysis of Internet service statistics in real time under high load.”