Anna Sbrodova
Senior Lead Backend Engineer
Building resilient systems that eliminate midnight firefighting. With 12+ years of experience across Go, Java, and GCP, I offer the dual advantage of a highly autonomous individual contributor and a strategic team collaborator. I am equally effective at taking full-lifecycle ownership of a project from design to deployment, or partnering across teams to align on goals and architectural standards.
My approach is to prioritize proactive observability and automated hardening from the first line of code. I act as a safe pair of hands, delivering production-ready, distributed systems independently while ensuring the final architecture remains stable, transparent, and low-maintenance for the entire organization.
The Engineering Manifesto
Proactive Observability
If an incident happens, the system should tell us first, and tell us exactly where. Comprehensive structured logging, tracing, and metric collection ensures zero blind spots in production.
Automated Hardening
Failures are inevitable; systemic outages are not. Implementing resilient patterns like circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff, and idempotency guarantees safe distributed communication.
Hexagonal Architecture
Business logic must remain pure and decoupled from infrastructure concerns. Adhering to strict domain-driven design ensures that replacing a database or messaging queue is a configuration change, not a rewrite.
Technical Track Record
Hands-on Technical Lead
EPAM Systems
Mar 2025 — Present
Directing the technical roadmap and architectural integrity for a distributed unit of 10 engineers.
- Architected and built a scalable platform from scratch, abstracting complex infrastructure for enterprise use.
- Standardized backend development workflows to shift focus from boilerplate code to architectural perfection and production hardening.
- Balanced independent technical execution with collaborative leadership, bridging gaps between engineering and cross-functional units to align on goals and ensure architectural standards.
Tech: Golang, GCP, Terraform, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, GKE, Kubernetes.
Team Lead / Senior Backend Engineer
EPAM Systems
May 2023 — Mar 2025
- Acted as a software engineer for high-stakes microservices while simultaneously translating complex requirements into maintainable, high-load architectures in Go and GCP.
- Balanced deep-focus backend development with technical team leadership, ensuring both architectural excellence and a healthy, collaborative team atmosphere.
- Fostered a resilient team environment by mentoring engineers and proactively managing interpersonal dynamics—including successfully resolving "toxic" behavioral challenges—to maintain a high-trust, high-velocity culture.
Tech: Golang, GCP, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, Grafana, Loki, Docker.
Senior Software Engineer
Mano Mano
Feb 2022 — Apr 2023
- Achieved High-Load Optimization by refactoring legacy queries and optimizing Golang services to maintain sub-second latency for thousands of concurrent users during peak e-commerce events.
Tech: Golang, GCP, Spring Boot, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB.
Early Career History
IBA, Standard Bank & IBM, WF-TESSI
2014 — 2021
- Mid to Senior roles focusing on Java Enterprise logistics, RPA automation (Workfusion), and full-stack development for Corporate Banking.
Architectural Deep Dives
Challenge: Ensuring data consistency across distributed microservices when updating a local database and publishing a domain event to a message broker (Cloud Pub/Sub) simultaneously. A failure in either step leads to system-wide inconsistencies.
Solution: Architected a Transactional Outbox pattern using Golang and Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL). Events are saved in the same transaction as the business entity. A separate CDC (Change Data Capture) or polling worker securely publishes these events to Pub/Sub with at-least-once delivery guarantees.
Impact: Achieved 100% data consistency in high-concurrency environments without relying on distributed transactions (2PC), significantly improving system resilience and throughput.
The Tooling Lab (Open Source)
Aura Tracker GCP ↗
Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server
- Authored a commercial-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in Go, demonstrating high-load optimization and secure external system integration.
- Exposes complex GCP operations as structured tools, enabling secure orchestration of cloud environments with built-in dry-run safety and strict type validation.
- Architected strictly in Go using Hexagonal Architecture to decouple the JSON-RPC communication layer from GCP SDK logic.
Tech: Golang, GCP SDK, MCP Protocol, AI Tooling.
Core Competencies
Primary Stack
Golang, Java, SQL, GCP (Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Firebase, Cloud SQL)
Architecture
System Design, Distributed Consistency, Event-Driven Architecture, High-Load Optimization
Infrastructure
Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Eventarc
Observability
GCP Monitoring, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus
Tooling & Automation
MCP Protocol Integration, Infrastructure Orchestration, CI/CD Pipeline Design
Contractor Availability
B2B Readiness: B2B / Contract Readiness: Fully equipped for international remote engagement; self-managed taxation in Indonesia (WITA / UTC+8 timezone).