Senior Full-Stack QA Engineer
ContractNov 2025 — now
emcd — crypto mining infrastructure
- Test mining pool services, monitoring systems and payout flows in a live production platform — involved from design stage through release.
- Designed the team's AI-assisted QA workflow: test cases generated with LLMs, autotests developed under my direction with Claude Code, review automated through subagents and MCP integrations.
- +40% throughput measured on test-case authoring time, task testing time and closed story points — 12–15 a week against a baseline of 8–10.
- Coverage spans REST and GraphQL APIs, Kafka event flows, SQL validation and infrastructure checks.
QA Lead
ContractNov 2025 — now
Product company — CRM and low-code workflow platform, iGaming
- Lead QA across two product directions with a team of two engineers: full ownership of the primary one, oversight of the second.
- Own quality of an n8n-class low-code workflow builder automating internal business processes on top of the company CRM — Elsa workflow engine, Kafka, GraphQL.
- Author test strategy, regression scope and technical specifications for E2E automation; run release acceptance.
- Introduced reusable agent skills that standardise bug reports, test cases and team working agreements.
QA & Automation Engineer
Sole QAMar 2024 — Nov 2025
Cybersecurity product company — automated vulnerability assessment and penetration testing platform
- Only QA and automation engineer in a six-person product team — two frontend, two backend, QA, product owner. Took the product from startup stage through MVP to its first paying customers; it now serves ~20 enterprise clients.
- Built the quality function from zero: strategy, documentation, regression suite, automated tests, CI/CD pipelines.
- Ran security and performance testing for a platform that scans networks, detects and exploits vulnerabilities, and audits Docker, Kubernetes and Active Directory.
- Defined release criteria and acted as the final quality gate for every production release.
QA Lead, Search
A1QAAug 2023 — Oct 2025
Large B2B e-commerce retailer
- Joined as Senior QA, promoted to lead of the search domain within six to eight months; team of two to three engineers.
- Zero production incidents across 14 months of leading the domain.
- Owned quality of an Apache Solr search: relevance, indexing, faceted filters, catalogue integrations.
- Features released under my quality ownership contributed to a 17% revenue increase for the direction.
Technical Coordinator, CTO Office
A1QAFeb 2022 — Aug 2023
IT services company, 1000+ employees
- Cross-company technical role covering up to 12 projects at once as an embedded tech lead.
- Optimised procurement of software licences and mobile hardware, saving $80,000+.
- Designed and launched an in-house remote device farm adopted across the company.
- In the 2022 infrastructure separation programme — systems, software and teams moved into a new isolated environment on a different toolchain — personally owned 1C, Keycloak, authentication and access management.
- Conference speaker on mobile testing (500+ attendees); designed a mobile testing course — 10+ lectures, 300+ engineers trained; delivered corporate training for Alfa-Bank's engineering team.
Mobile QA Engineer → Mobile QA Lead
A1QADec 2020 — Feb 2022
Acronis — cloud backup and data protection
- Promoted to lead a three-person mobile QA team within four months.
- Cut the full regression cycle from 30 hours to 7 by moving repeatable checks into API-level Postman collections, introducing device-level UI automation and merging overlapping cases into cross-area scenarios.
- Raised the mobile app store rating from 2.1 to 4.2 stars; made remote-device testing a company-wide practice.
QA Intern → QA Engineer
A1QA2019 — Dec 2020
Acronis — cloud backup and data protection
- Completed internal training and certification, then joined the staff as a Middle QA Engineer in June 2020.
- Functional testing of desktop, web and cloud backup products in a team of eight; virtualisation across Windows, Linux, macOS and VMware ESXi.
Pavel Kavalchuk