Denis Gushcha

Head of Engineering

Denis Gushcha


denis@gushcha.com

LinkedIn denis.gushcha.com

Limassol, Cyprus

Broad engineering experience ranging from national railway infrastructure serving 5 million monthly customers to payments platforms processing millions of daily transactions across hundreds of PSP integrations. Built cross-functional teams from scratch, owned architecture and delivery across both domains, and consistently applied strategic foresight by anticipating challenges, shaping long-term direction, and taking on critical strategy and coordination work that often fell through the cracks.

Work experience

Engineering Lead · Payments

Confidential · iGaming & Payments Platform

Sep 2022 – Present

Payments infrastructure serving large amount daily transactions across hundreds of PSP integrations · Cyprus

  • Engineering leadership — Built engineering teams from scratch (Frontend, Backend, QA, SA). Own the full cycle: hiring, onboarding, performance, task prioritisation and cuts when needed
  • Technical strategy — Own end-to-end delivery of the payments domain from architecture decisions with the CTO through to cross-platform deployment across web, Android, iOS.
  • System re-engineering — Migrated deposit and withdrawal flows from legacy monolith to cross-platform microfrontend architecture, improved deposit conversion, cut TTFI and reduced interaction cost. Improved product reliability by introducing E2E test coverage across critical user flows
  • Operational complexity — Delivered a payments rule engine enabling operations teams to manage thousands guard, KYC, and geo-routing policies removing engineering from routine configuration entirely
  • Cross-functional coordination — Primary technical liaison between frontend, backend, mobile, analytics, and product teams driving cross-team alignment on architecture decisions and incident resolution
  • Process ownership — Absorbed project management responsibilities through three rounds of PM turnover: structured delivery plans, managed stakeholder communication, kept output stable
  • AI tooling adoption — Introduced AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Gemini) across the team as standard engineering practice.

Senior Frontend Developer

Headhunter Group · Talantix ATS

Mar 2020 – Aug 2022

B2B recruitment platform (ATS) · 3,000+ enterprise clients · Moscow, Russia

  • Mentored a mid-level engineers through to senior level
  • Led adoption of a product-wide design system enabling consistent UI delivery with minimal per-feature engineering overhead
  • Contributed to platform migration from REST to GraphQL, improving data-fetching efficiency and reducing frontend complexity
  • Ran 2–3 A/B tests per week on conversion-critical flows as part of a structured growth program.

Frontend Tech Lead

INEX Ltd. · Nov 2016 – Feb 2020

Railway ticketing platform · 5M+ MAU · Moscow, Russia

  • Led a team (Engineers, QA, SA) on a national-scale railway e-commerce platform serving 5M+ monthly users
  • Designed and built a multi-vendor in-transit food delivery system solving real-time train position sync, station-based delivery windows, and booking timeout constraints across multiple vendors simultaneously
  • Responsible for frontend architecture decisions, technical scoping, and cross-team coordination on a high-load, time-sensitive platform

Software Integration Specialist

Computel System Management Ltd. · Jul 2012 – Jan 2016

IBM Identity & Access Management systems · Moscow, Russia

Education

MSc, Applied Mathematics

2007 – 2012

Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM) · Technical University

Skills

  • Engineering: TypeScript · React · Vue.js · Nuxt.js · Playwright · Microfrontend architecture · System design
  • Platforms: Web · Android (WebView) · iOS (WKWebView) · PSP
  • Other: GraphQL · A/B · CI/CD · IBM IAM · XSLT · Python (basic) · Git