Hi I'm - Misha - Picture of the author

Hi I'm - Misha

Principal Engineer · Software Architect · Tech Lead

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  • Location
    California, USA
  • Timezone
    Pacific, UTC-07:00
  • Updated
    Friday, Jul 31, 2026

I design systems, define technical direction, and lead engineering teams through complete delivery cycles — from the first architecture decision to live production at scale.

19+ years of end-to-end ownership across government, media, and tech. I take products from 0 to launch and build the teams that sustain them.

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About me

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Tech Lead / Principal Engineer with 19+ years building and running production systems across government, media, and technology. I set technical direction, design architecture from scratch, and stay accountable through the full delivery cycle — from the first design decision to the system running in production.

  • 10+ production systems shipped solo or as technical lead — architecture, backend, frontend, and infrastructure
  • Led engineering teams of 5–15 people across government, media, and enterprise software
  • Made the stack, architecture, and CI/CD calls that teams live with for years
  • Shipped in regulated, high-stakes environments: federal government platforms, high-traffic media, IoT hardware

Work Activity

Real-time work activity: contributions, repositories, languages, and commit history. Open source involvement and coding patterns visualized.

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Contributions This Year

Commit Activity

Last 52 weeks

Independent Projects

Projects conceived, built, and operated end-to-end on my own — from embedded IoT hardware and satellite flight software to cloud platforms and web services. Each one is real and running, not a tutorial clone: I own every layer, from hardware interfacing and firmware to backend architecture and the frontend, and every trade-off in between.

Automated Home Observatory

Built a fully automated observatory from scratch, tying Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and Python together into one control system for remote telescope operation and image capture. The web layer handles real-time data streaming, user auth, and a celestial events calendar. Solo project — hardware interface, automation engine, backend API, and frontend all built and run by me.

IoT Weather Station

IoT system built in-house: custom Arduino firmware for multi-sensor data collection, a REST API serving live and historical readings, and a dashboard for visualization. Feeds into the observatory pipeline as a safety gate — imaging sessions pause automatically when conditions are bad.

Asteroid Proximity Tracker

Data platform pulling from NASA's NeoWS API to track near-Earth asteroid approaches. Surfaces close-approach windows, velocity, estimated diameter, and orbital paths as a live dashboard — turning raw orbital mechanics data into something readable.

Geo-Discovery Platform

Geo-discovery platform on a microservices architecture (Next.js, PHP, MySQL) with interactive map exploration, user-generated content, photo uploads, and a gamified reputation system. Designed the data model, defined the service boundaries, and built it end-to-end from schema to deployment.

Astronomy Outreach Channel

Science-accurate astronomy channel covering celestial events, astrophotography, and observational data for a growing audience. Run solo — editorial pipeline, production workflow, and community engagement — as a long-running side project outside of software.

CubeSat Sim

CubeSat Sim

Flight software stack for a real, physical CubeSat, not a simulation on paper. Five independent Python services — OBC, EPS, ADCS, Payload, COMMS — model each satellite subsystem, communicating exclusively over MQTT like a real spacecraft bus and coordinated by a mission-lifecycle state machine. Runs today on a Raspberry Pi inside a 3D-printed frame, wired to real sensors — battery gauge, IMU, GPS, camera — relaying telemetry to a companion cloud ground station over HTTP and LoRa.

CubeSat Ground Station

Cloud-side counterpart to CubeSat Sim: ingests telemetry POSTed every 30 seconds by the satellite's COMMS service, stores it in MySQL, and renders it as a widget-based mission-control dashboard — subsystem health, live telemetry graphs, a mission event log, and a 3D orbit/ground-track globe built with three.js. PHP/CodeIgniter 4 REST API on the backend, React/TypeScript frontend with Redux Toolkit (RTK Query) and Apache ECharts.

TARS — Telegram AI Bot

TARS — Telegram AI Bot

Telegram AI bot for a Russian astronomy community, named after the AI from Interstellar. Runs a pluggable conversational engine (Groq or OpenAI, swappable via config) with per-user adaptive personality, unprompted proactive posting, and persistent memory in SQLite. Talks to two companion always-on services over MQTT — a CubeSat ground station for live satellite telemetry and photos, and a star-chart generator for on-demand night-sky maps — turning the bot into the shared front end for the whole CubeSat project.

Starmap Service

Starmap Service

Always-on Python renderer that generates night-sky star charts on demand and serves them to the TARS Telegram bot over MQTT, keeping the heavy astronomical catalogs and matplotlib rendering out of the bot process so a crash there never takes it down. Loads star, deep-sky-object, constellation, and JPL ephemeris catalogs once at startup, then renders full-sky, galactic, zenith, horizon, and optic-view charts through a single queued worker, publishing its own online/offline status so the bot always knows whether charts are available.

Simple React UI Kit

Open-source, fully typed React component library — 17 production-ready components (Button, Select, Table, DatePicker, Dialog, and more), documented in a live Storybook. Themeable via CSS variables, accessible by default, and kept lightweight with React/dayjs as peer dependencies. Published on npm with CI-enforced linting, tests, and SonarCloud gates; powers the IoT Weather Station dashboard above.

Engineering Experience

19+ years of technical leadership across government, media, and technology — from greenfield architecture to production, across 9 roles in 3 industries.

  • Sep 2021Present
    4 yrs 10 mos

    Lead Software Engineer

    Current
    Technical lead for a large-scale React/TypeScript application, setting architecture and engineering standards for a distributed team. Designed the component architecture now used org-wide. Took automated test coverage from near-zero to 85%+ (unit, integration, visual regression) with Jest, Playwright, and RTL. Built the CI/CD pipeline with SonarQube quality gates, replacing manual regression testing and shortening time-to-merge. Added API simulation tooling and a dedicated test environment that cut frontend iteration time. Coordinate with UI/UX, backend, and QA leads on component and API contracts, and run regular code reviews to keep quality consistent across the team.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptTypeScriptReactReduxSASSTailwindCSSStorybook
    • Backend
      RestAPIGoPostgreSQL
    • Testing
      PlaywrightJestRTL
    • Infrastructure
      DockerGitJenkinsSonarQubeLinuxGitHubActions
  • Mar 2018Sep 2024
    6 yrs 6 mos

    Lead Software Engineer

    Part-time, concurrent engagement alongside the Lead Software Engineer role above. Ran the full technical lifecycle for a portfolio of high-traffic WordPress platforms serving multiple media organizations under strict performance SLAs. Built custom PHP modules and MySQL schema changes to keep the sites reliable under peak load. Managed the VPS infrastructure stack — provisioning, security hardening, patch cadence, and disaster recovery. Built SEO tooling and social distribution integrations that grew audience reach across platforms. Designed custom themes balancing editorial UX with page performance. Sole point of contact for infrastructure and application issues across the portfolio.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptjQueryTypeScriptHTMLCSS
    • Backend
      PHPMySQL
    • Infrastructure
      Linux
    • CMS
      WordPress
  • Jul 2021Nov 2022
    1 yr 4 mos

    Senior Frontend Developer

    Contract role, concurrent with the Lead Software Engineer position above. Built a centralized QA portal giving engineering leadership visibility across 36 microservices for the first time. Built a Bitbucket integration that automated project data extraction, replacing a manual process. Wrote automated UI test suites for 36+ microservices from scratch using React Testing Library, Jest, and Playwright. Built a microservice for real-time test telemetry and an Allure aggregation plugin consolidating quality metrics into one dashboard. Extended CI/CD pipelines org-wide with quality gates and coverage thresholds. Led code review standards and contributed to accessibility testing practices.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptTypeScriptReactReduxSASSSemanticUI
    • Backend
      RestAPI
    • Testing
      PlaywrightJestRTL
    • Infrastructure
      GitJenkinsLinux
  • Aug 2016Jul 2021
    4 yrs 11 mos

    Engineering Team Lead

    Led a cross-functional engineering team building systems for federal and regional government under strict compliance requirements. Built a payment integration with state banking infrastructure for a federal cashback program used by millions of citizens at launch. Built a COVID-19 monitoring and compliance system for the Orenburg region, integrated with federal APIs and driving real-time SMS notifications at regional scale. Took a citizen-government issue reporting portal from zero to production; it became the primary channel for municipal reporting in the region. Designed microservice infrastructure for e-document integration and regulatory compliance. Set technical direction across several concurrent government contracts, running delivery via Agile/Scrum while managing engineers, QA, and external stakeholders.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptTypeScriptReactReduxCSSHTMLSemanticUI
    • Backend
      RestAPIPHPMySQLPostgreSQLPythonCodeIgniter
    • Infrastructure
      GitDockerJenkinsLinux
  • Apr 2015Aug 2016
    1 yr 4 mos

    Full-Stack Developer

    Built a distributed news aggregation platform with a high-throughput database layer to ingest and serve content from multiple live feeds under sustained load, including the UI and a banner ad integration API. Designed distributed schemas for high-load ingestion. Built APIs for telecom payment processing and a full billing system with accounting, subscriber management, and payment statistics dashboards. Set up CI/CD pipelines and backup infrastructure across all project environments. Wrote system documentation for administrators and solution architects.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptjQueryCSSHTML
    • Backend
      RestAPIPHPMySQL
    • Infrastructure
      GitLinux
    • CMS
      DrupalJoomlaWordPress
  • Oct 2013Apr 2015
    1 yr 6 mos

    Full-Stack Developer

    Designed the PostgreSQL spatial database for a production GIS system, optimized for large-scale spatial queries. Built the core GIS application in PHP/Yii and the mapping subsystem in Delphi with a JavaScript/jQuery frontend. Led the migration from a monolith to microservices, enabling independent deployment and better scalability. Implemented role-based access control. Owned deployment on client infrastructure and wrote developer and end-user documentation.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptjQueryCSSHTML
    • Backend
      RestAPIPHPYiiMySQLPostgreSQLDelphi
    • Infrastructure
      GitLinux
  • Jul 2011Jun 2012
    11 mos

    Full-Stack Developer

    Built a custom CMS from scratch in PHP/Laravel, including the admin interface, a PostgreSQL data layer, and a modular extension system for news, articles, and user management. Delivered client websites on the platform and built third-party integrations for hotel and flight booking services. Prototyped client MVPs under tight deadlines and provided post-launch technical support.
    • Frontend
      JavaScriptjQueryCSSHTMLBootstrap
    • Backend
      PHPMySQL
    • Infrastructure
      GitLinux
  • Oct 2008Jul 2011
    2 yrs 9 mos

    Systems & Network Engineer

    Designed and deployed LAN infrastructure for residential and commercial clients, from cable and fiber splicing to switch configuration and Linux server administration. Managed subscriber servers with a focus on uptime, security hardening, and incident response. Installed alarm and video surveillance systems. Built a custom billing system in Delphi that automated invoicing and payment reconciliation — a self-initiated project that replaced a fully manual process.
    • Backend
      PHPMySQL
    • Infrastructure
      GitLinuxCentOS
  • Jun 2005Dec 2007
    2 yrs 6 mos

    Hardware & Systems Technician

    Assembled, configured, and maintained desktop systems and office equipment for commercial clients. Installed LAN cabling and configured network switches for performance and traffic management. Built a custom billing application in Delphi on my own initiative — my first real software project, and the reason I moved into engineering full-time.

Technical Skills

These are measured by systems shipped and teams unblocked, not years accumulated. A candid read on where I operate at full capacity: architecture decisions, full-stack delivery, and the complete engineering lifecycle.

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Redux
  • SASS
  • TailwindCSS
  • Storybook
  • RestAPI
  • Go
  • PostgreSQL
  • Playwright
  • Jest
  • RTL
  • Docker
  • Git
  • Jenkins
  • SonarQube
  • Linux
  • GitHubActions
  • jQuery
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • WordPress
  • SemanticUI
  • Python
  • CodeIgniter
  • Drupal
  • Joomla
  • Yii
  • Delphi
  • Bootstrap
  • CentOS

Frontend Engineering

Backend & APIs

Infrastructure & DevOps

AI & Automation

Get In Touch

I'm always open to discussing new projects, creative ideas, or opportunities to build something great.