Overview

News Media Holding is one of the largest digital media companies in Russia, operating multiple online publications with millions of monthly readers. I joined the company as a Backend Engineer and eventually became the technical lead of the backend team, working on high-load content platforms used daily by journalists, editors, and readers.

The platform handled thousands of requests per second and required a strong focus on performance, reliability, and developer experience.

The Challenge

As the product grew, several engineering problems became increasingly noticeable:

• PostgreSQL became a performance bottleneck under heavy traffic.
• Editorial workflows involved too many manual steps, slowing down content publishing.
• Infrastructure setup and deployments required significant manual effort.
• Backend services needed better fault tolerance as traffic continued to grow.
• The engineering team lacked consistent backend development standards.

My Contributions

Performance Optimization

I investigated slow SQL queries using Grafana, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and pg_stat_statements, redesigned indexes, optimized query execution plans, and reduced unnecessary database work.

These improvements lowered PostgreSQL load by approximately 60% while improving API response times during peak traffic.

Internal Publishing Platform

I designed and implemented an internal service that simplified how editors created and managed content.

The new workflow reduced the average publishing time by 30%, while improvements in the authoring experience contributed to a 50% increase in conversion.

Infrastructure & CI/CD

I built a complete Docker-based development environment and introduced GitLab CI pipelines that automated testing, image building, and deployments.

New developers could onboard significantly faster, and deployments became consistent across environments.

Backend Architecture

I designed scalable backend services using NestJS, Redis, RabbitMQ, and BullMQ.

The architecture emphasized asynchronous processing, background jobs, caching, and fault tolerance to keep the platform responsive during traffic spikes.

Technical Leadership

As Lead Backend Engineer, I regularly reviewed pull requests, introduced shared engineering standards, mentored teammates, and helped drive architectural decisions across multiple services.

Technologies

Node.js • TypeScript • NestJS • PostgreSQL • Redis • RabbitMQ • BullMQ • Docker • TypeORM • Swagger • Grafana • Prometheus

Results

• Reduced PostgreSQL load by 60%
• Increased publishing efficiency by 30%
• Improved business conversion by 50%
• Automated builds and deployments with GitLab CI
• Improved scalability and reliability of high-load backend services