Senior Backend Developer at SMART
Dmitrii Lunev
Council Member
Dmitrii Lunev is a Senior Python Backend Engineer and Tech Lead with over six years of experience building scalable backend platforms, microservices architectures, and distributed systems across B2B, healthcare, veterinary, and HR domains. His work consistently combines strong engineering execution with hands-on technical leadership, mentoring engineers, contributing to architectural decisions, and embedding quality practices across the full product lifecycle.
Dmitrii Lunev currently serves as Senior Backend Developer at START, a position he has held since May 2026. In this role he has contributed to the architectural decomposition of a legacy monolith into a service-oriented architecture, designing the target system architecture, domain and service boundaries, API contracts, data ownership models, integration patterns, and a phased migration roadmap while preserving backward compatibility. He designed and implemented an OAuth 2.0 and OIDC Authorization Code flow with mTLS, PKCE, state and nonce validation, anti-replay protection, and secure token handling to integrate Sber ID as a new authentication provider into the backend platform. He also designed centralized feature flag management using Unleash, establishing guidelines for canary releases and controlled production rollouts. His stack at START includes Python, Go, FastAPI, Flask, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, Kafka, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kubernetes, Helm, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog APM, among others.
Prior to this, Dmitrii Lunev held the position of Lead Backend Engineer at КОМПЭЛ from August 2024 to April 2026, where he led a team of six backend engineers across a B2B microservices platform for electronic components. Under his leadership, test coverage across all microservices rose from 27% to 95%, substantially improving reliability and error detection. He optimized an electronic component import process that reduced service downtime from six hours to twenty minutes, accelerating database updates by 18x. He further reduced average server response time for component search from 1.2 seconds to 112 milliseconds, a roughly 10x improvement in request processing speed. He introduced BDD scenarios as a single source of truth for requirements, training analysts and QA engineers to write requirements and test cases and developers to translate those scenarios directly into business logic. He also implemented mandatory CI/CD quality gates using mypy, ruff, vulture, bandit, and automated tests, blocking merges and deployments on violations, and he facilitated cross-team knowledge sharing through regular syncs and short-term developer rotations. The technical stack included Python, FastAPI, FastStream, Kafka, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic, Keycloak, Behave, Grafana, and Sentry.
Before КОМПЭЛ, Dmitrii Lunev spent four and a half years at Fortech in a series of progressively senior roles. As Head of Python Development from June 2022 to August 2024, he led the hiring and onboarding of Python developers, conducting technical interviews and contributing to the refinement of the candidate evaluation process. During this period he delivered two major projects. For a fitness application, he built a media service using Django and MinIO for handling images and videos, developed a flexible calorie tracking system supporting multiple measurement units, and implemented a nutrition and macronutrient tracking journal. For a mobile application serving pet owners, he integrated VetManagerAPI to provide automatic access to medical records, implemented the CloudPayments payment system for clinic appointments and shelter donations, built a clinic moderation system, developed event and map point search functionality using PostGIS and GeoAlchemy2, and created an onboarding customization system via an admin panel that increased new user conversion rates.
As Senior Backend Developer at Fortech from January 2021 to June 2022, Dmitrii Lunev led development on two separate products. For an HR electronic document management service, he implemented document generation using DOCX templates, built a role-based access control system, added support for both simple and enhanced digital signatures, integrated the service with a notification system via Kafka, and designed a microservices migration plan. For an online recruitment service, he developed a finite-state machine for candidate status transitions, integrated passport verification and document parsing systems, connected the service to the HR document management platform to automate document creation and signing upon hiring, and introduced email and phone verification for candidates.
Dmitrii Lunev currently serves as Senior Backend Developer at START, a position he has held since May 2026. In this role he has contributed to the architectural decomposition of a legacy monolith into a service-oriented architecture, designing the target system architecture, domain and service boundaries, API contracts, data ownership models, integration patterns, and a phased migration roadmap while preserving backward compatibility. He designed and implemented an OAuth 2.0 and OIDC Authorization Code flow with mTLS, PKCE, state and nonce validation, anti-replay protection, and secure token handling to integrate Sber ID as a new authentication provider into the backend platform. He also designed centralized feature flag management using Unleash, establishing guidelines for canary releases and controlled production rollouts. His stack at START includes Python, Go, FastAPI, Flask, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, Kafka, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kubernetes, Helm, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog APM, among others.
Prior to this, Dmitrii Lunev held the position of Lead Backend Engineer at КОМПЭЛ from August 2024 to April 2026, where he led a team of six backend engineers across a B2B microservices platform for electronic components. Under his leadership, test coverage across all microservices rose from 27% to 95%, substantially improving reliability and error detection. He optimized an electronic component import process that reduced service downtime from six hours to twenty minutes, accelerating database updates by 18x. He further reduced average server response time for component search from 1.2 seconds to 112 milliseconds, a roughly 10x improvement in request processing speed. He introduced BDD scenarios as a single source of truth for requirements, training analysts and QA engineers to write requirements and test cases and developers to translate those scenarios directly into business logic. He also implemented mandatory CI/CD quality gates using mypy, ruff, vulture, bandit, and automated tests, blocking merges and deployments on violations, and he facilitated cross-team knowledge sharing through regular syncs and short-term developer rotations. The technical stack included Python, FastAPI, FastStream, Kafka, PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic, Keycloak, Behave, Grafana, and Sentry.
Before КОМПЭЛ, Dmitrii Lunev spent four and a half years at Fortech in a series of progressively senior roles. As Head of Python Development from June 2022 to August 2024, he led the hiring and onboarding of Python developers, conducting technical interviews and contributing to the refinement of the candidate evaluation process. During this period he delivered two major projects. For a fitness application, he built a media service using Django and MinIO for handling images and videos, developed a flexible calorie tracking system supporting multiple measurement units, and implemented a nutrition and macronutrient tracking journal. For a mobile application serving pet owners, he integrated VetManagerAPI to provide automatic access to medical records, implemented the CloudPayments payment system for clinic appointments and shelter donations, built a clinic moderation system, developed event and map point search functionality using PostGIS and GeoAlchemy2, and created an onboarding customization system via an admin panel that increased new user conversion rates.
As Senior Backend Developer at Fortech from January 2021 to June 2022, Dmitrii Lunev led development on two separate products. For an HR electronic document management service, he implemented document generation using DOCX templates, built a role-based access control system, added support for both simple and enhanced digital signatures, integrated the service with a notification system via Kafka, and designed a microservices migration plan. For an online recruitment service, he developed a finite-state machine for candidate status transitions, integrated passport verification and document parsing systems, connected the service to the HR document management platform to automate document creation and signing upon hiring, and introduced email and phone verification for candidates.
Dmitrii Lunev began his career at Fortech as a Backend Developer from February 2020 to January 2021, working across three projects. For an admin panel managing pallet shipment requests, he refactored the external service API from XML to JSON, added a request queue to eliminate processing bottlenecks, and implemented a complete event log for auditability. For a private medical clinic franchise application, he optimized the data synchronization algorithm and introduced API data caching to reduce server load. He also designed and built a desktop application for automatic license plate recognition and vehicle weight auditing, implementing Tesseract OCR for plate identification from both images and video, integrating API-based control for weight scales, and configuring a Windows installer using PyInstaller. The stacks across these projects included Python, Sanic, aiohttp, Celery, PostgreSQL, OpenCV, PyQt6, SQLAlchemy, SQLite, and Docker.
In addition to his professional roles, Dmitrii Lunev maintains a technical blog, A Little More, where he publishes in-depth articles on backend engineering topics. His published work covers BDD as a requirements and testing methodology, dependency injection patterns in Python using frameworks such as FastAPI, Litestar, and Dishka, practical approaches to AI agent workflows, developer KPIs and their limitations, and technical interview methodology. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Software Engineering from South Russian State Technical University (Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute).
His technical expertise spans Python, Go, FastAPI, Flask, Django, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, MinIO, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog APM, Sentry, Keycloak, PostGIS, GeoAlchemy2, OpenCV, FastStream, Behave, pytest, and related tooling across the MLOps and LLMOps space including RAG pipelines, vector databases, and LLM integrations.
In addition to his professional roles, Dmitrii Lunev maintains a technical blog, A Little More, where he publishes in-depth articles on backend engineering topics. His published work covers BDD as a requirements and testing methodology, dependency injection patterns in Python using frameworks such as FastAPI, Litestar, and Dishka, practical approaches to AI agent workflows, developer KPIs and their limitations, and technical interview methodology. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Software Engineering from South Russian State Technical University (Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute).
His technical expertise spans Python, Go, FastAPI, Flask, Django, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Celery, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, MinIO, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, GitLab CI/CD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog APM, Sentry, Keycloak, PostGIS, GeoAlchemy2, OpenCV, FastStream, Behave, pytest, and related tooling across the MLOps and LLMOps space including RAG pipelines, vector databases, and LLM integrations.