AN
Warsaw, PL

Work

Work

Twenty years of building backends, the last eight in Go. Systems that have to hold up under load: banking, cloud security, messaging, real-time advertising, and my own product.

Aliaksei Novikau, seated, in a backwards cap
2025 — presentWarsaw, Poland

Rakuten Viber

Senior Backend Engineer (Go), Ads Platform

Building and operating Viber’s production OpenRTB auction platform.

  • Up to 35K auctions and 250K outbound bidder requests per second under strict p99 latency constraints.
  • Cut tail latency by 15–25% at peak traffic by optimising Go request-processing paths.
  • Designed an orchestration layer and a floor-price optimisation agent that lifted advertising revenue by about 3%, with an extensible architecture for further agents.
  • Resiliency for SSP/DSP integrations: circuit breakers, timeouts, fail-safe degradation.

Go, OpenRTB 2.5/2.6, Aerospike, Redis, GCP, Kubernetes, Datadog

2023 — presentWarsaw, Poland

Paperspell

CTO & Co-founder

An AI document assistant for people who deal with paperwork in a foreign country. I own the technical direction and remain the primary backend engineer.

  • Designed the Go/gRPC backend on GCP, including bidirectional mobile-to-cloud synchronisation with conflict resolution.
  • AI pipelines for OCR, classification, summarisation and structured extraction on Document AI and generative models.
  • Infrastructure as code with Terraform, CI/CD, cost-optimised cloud architecture.
  • Engineering planning and delivery, hiring, onboarding and mentoring of a small early-stage team.

Go, gRPC, GCP, Cloud Run, Firestore, SQLite, Terraform, Gen AI, Document AI

2022 — 2025Israel, remote

Orca Security

Senior Go Engineer (R&D)

A distributed secret-detection engine inside a cloud security platform, scanning petabyte-scale environments.

  • Reduced false positives through heuristic tuning and pattern optimisation.
  • Parallelised scanning workflows with Go concurrency to significantly increase throughput.
  • Designed and implemented a Kubernetes operator for scalable file scanning with automated workload distribution.
  • Technically led a team of 3–5 engineers and took part in cross-team architecture reviews.

Go, Python, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, gRPC

2018 — 2022

Spiral Scout

Lead Go Engineer

Led backend development of distributed Go services across several production platforms.

  • Monolith-to-microservices migration with scalable communication patterns.
  • Distributed workflows on RabbitMQ and Temporal; concurrent video-encoding pipelines with FFmpeg.
  • Introduced tracing, metrics, structured logging and CI/CD.
  • Led teams of 3–7 engineers: planning and delivery, hiring, mentoring, performance reviews.

Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Temporal, RabbitMQ, AWS, Docker, Nomad, FFmpeg

2015 — 2018

IBA Group

Go / Java Engineer

Backend and distributed systems in Go and Java for banking, cloud and cross-platform products.

2003 — 2015

Earlier

Senior Java / C++ Engineer

Enterprise backends and high-availability systems for banks and large corporations.

1997 — 2006

Research

University of Trento and ITC-irst, 2004–2006

Minsk, 1997

  • 1997Electronic Properties and Overlap Integral Matrix Calculation Accuracy for Silicon-Based Structureswith V. Novikau, A. Kholod, A. FilonovPhysics, Chemistry and Application of Nanostructures (Nanomeeting-97), Minsk, 1997, pp. 129–131
  • 1997Optimal Expansion of Atomic Orbitals in a Basis of Slater-Type FunctionsОптимальное разложение атомных орбиталей по базису функций слэтеровского типаwith A. KholodPhysics of Condensed Matter, abstracts of the 5th Republican conference of students and postgraduates, Grodno, April 1997, p. 115. Supervisor: V. Novikau

Education

  • Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics — Engineer of Automatic Control Systems.
  • PhD studies in Software Engineering, University of Trento (not completed).

Back home

Let’s talk

Open to new opportunities.

Consulting, part-time or full-time. If you have an interesting project or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you.