Senior iOS Engineer at Alfa-bank
Georgia
Sergei Podgainy
Council Member
Sergei Podgainy is a Senior iOS Engineer with over five years of experience building high-load mobile products across fintech and e-commerce, having worked in environments ranging from three-person startups to 120-person engineering teams. His work spans the full development lifecycle, from gathering product owner requirements through to establishing fully automated release pipelines with high test coverage and detailed analytics. He brings particular depth in Swift, modern concurrency, Backend-Driven UI architectures, and developer tooling, combined with a broad understanding of product delivery, design systems, and cross-functional collaboration.
Since August 2024, Sergei Podgainy has served as an iOS Engineer at Alfa-Bank, one of the largest banks in Eastern Europe, where the fintech app serves 38 million customers including 18 million iOS users. In this role, he developed and maintained the Alfa Smart subscription module using in-house BDUI technology, enabling UI updates without requiring app releases and reducing time-to-ship for marketing screens from two weeks to two days. He built an in-house IDE on top of Monaco Editor for assembling Jinja-JSON BDUI contracts, complete with live multi-platform preview across iOS, Android, and Web, cutting assembly time by approximately 50% and seeing adoption by 500+ engineers across the bank. He led the architectural refactoring of the core BDUI framework, resolving a class of layout inconsistency bugs and bringing the crash-free rate on BDUI screens to 99%. He also implemented seven or more new UI components within Alfa's design system, which were subsequently adopted across 30 or more product teams.
Prior to Alfa-Bank, Sergei Podgainy worked as an iOS Engineer at 12 STOREEZ from June 2023 to July 2024, contributing to the e-commerce app of a premium women's clothing brand. He redesigned the two highest-traffic screens, the home screen and product card, which together account for over 80% of daily sessions. He migrated the project from GitHub to GitLab and configured CI/CD pipelines, reducing feature delivery time by approximately 30%. He also integrated new payment solutions that increased checkout conversion by 20%, and integrated the Google Maps SDK for the store pickup flow, boosting self-pickup conversion by more than 10%.
Since August 2024, Sergei Podgainy has served as an iOS Engineer at Alfa-Bank, one of the largest banks in Eastern Europe, where the fintech app serves 38 million customers including 18 million iOS users. In this role, he developed and maintained the Alfa Smart subscription module using in-house BDUI technology, enabling UI updates without requiring app releases and reducing time-to-ship for marketing screens from two weeks to two days. He built an in-house IDE on top of Monaco Editor for assembling Jinja-JSON BDUI contracts, complete with live multi-platform preview across iOS, Android, and Web, cutting assembly time by approximately 50% and seeing adoption by 500+ engineers across the bank. He led the architectural refactoring of the core BDUI framework, resolving a class of layout inconsistency bugs and bringing the crash-free rate on BDUI screens to 99%. He also implemented seven or more new UI components within Alfa's design system, which were subsequently adopted across 30 or more product teams.
Prior to Alfa-Bank, Sergei Podgainy worked as an iOS Engineer at 12 STOREEZ from June 2023 to July 2024, contributing to the e-commerce app of a premium women's clothing brand. He redesigned the two highest-traffic screens, the home screen and product card, which together account for over 80% of daily sessions. He migrated the project from GitHub to GitLab and configured CI/CD pipelines, reducing feature delivery time by approximately 30%. He also integrated new payment solutions that increased checkout conversion by 20%, and integrated the Google Maps SDK for the store pickup flow, boosting self-pickup conversion by more than 10%.
Before that, Sergei Podgainy was an iOS Engineer at Vivid from December 2020 to May 2023, working on the fintech app serving a multi-million user base. He developed core investment and trading features supporting 300,000 or more active investors on the platform. He drove onboarding improvements for new iOS developers by introducing internal documentation and a structured task roadmap, reducing ramp-up time to first pull request by 30%. Collaborating with backend and product teams on a redesign of the portfolio overview screen, he contributed to a 12% lift in 30-day retention among new investors. He migrated key screens from UIKit to SwiftUI, reducing view-layer code by approximately 35%, and optimized local data persistence for transaction history, eliminating redundant API calls on tab switching and reducing data usage by around 10%.
Sergei Podgainy holds a Master's degree in Information Systems and Technologies from Orenburg State University, completed in July 2020, having previously earned his Bachelor's degree in the same field from the same institution in July 2018.
Sergei Podgainy holds a Master's degree in Information Systems and Technologies from Orenburg State University, completed in July 2020, having previously earned his Bachelor's degree in the same field from the same institution in July 2018.