Ilia Usatov
Summary
Senior QA Engineer with experience in FinTech and E-commerce. Focused on backend and API testing, Java (Rest Assured) automation, shift-left practices, incident analysis, and release quality. I combine strong individual contributor depth with cross-functional leadership experience: I have led a product squad, launched high-scale initiatives, and improved quality visibility through observability and metrics. During a career break, I built and shipped two iOS applications, which strengthened my understanding of mobile architecture and full-cycle product delivery.
Experience
Indie iOS Developer
Nov 2025 — Present- Designed, developed, and launched two iOS applications from scratch: Timefall and Quietude.
- Built natively using SwiftUI, CoreData, AVFoundation, SpriteKit, HealthKit, and AlarmKit.
- Covered core functionality with unit tests to improve the stability of key user flows before release.
- Managed the full delivery cycle independently: architecture, development, debugging, App Store submission, ASO, and user feedback handling.
- Strengthened my understanding of mobile architecture, app lifecycle, and product trade-offs.
Acting Team Lead (Cross-functional Squad)
May 2025 — Oct 2025- Managed a cross-functional squad of 6 people (Android, iOS, Frontend, Backend), owning sprint planning, delivery coordination, and team synchronization.
- Designed a domain dashboard with quality metrics, telemetry, and key system health indicators so the team could assess critical flows from a single view.
- Combined delivery leadership with Senior QA responsibilities on high-priority product initiatives.
- Introduced a Zero Bug Policy, helping reduce technical debt and improve release predictability and product stability.
- Acted as feature lead for a large-scale Pepsi campaign (500k+ new users) and key integrations with Uzum Nasiya, Uzum Tezkor, and a government-led social project.
- Built and maintained around 400 API automated tests in Java / Rest Assured, integrated them into the CI pipeline, and reduced regression time from 2 days to 3 hours.
- Applied shift-left practices by joining requirement refinement, preparing API/backend test scenarios before development, and reviewing unit tests.
- Led a technical project to optimize push tokens across 4 systems (iOS, Android, Backend, CDP Altcraft), improving notification delivery stability and conversion.
- Worked with analysts to eliminate systemic data collection issues, improving the reliability of product metrics and reporting.
- Mentored new QA engineers and used AI tools to accelerate test preparation and analyze both server-side and mobile logs.
- Actively used Kibana and Grafana for incident investigation, log analysis, and detecting hidden issues in integration-heavy scenarios.
Senior QA Engineer
Sep 2021 — Apr 2023- Progressed to Senior QA within 1.5 years through high autonomy and ownership of critical product areas.
- Coordinated weekly releases of the investment platform (PWA, iOS, Android) from test planning to store submission.
- Implemented Test IT as the main TMS and standardized onboarding documentation, cutting ramp-up time for new hires by 50%.
- Owned quality for high-risk functionality including trading operations, Individual Investment Accounts (IIS), the user account area, and feedback systems.