Ilia Usatov
Senior QA Engineer / Team Lead
Summary
Senior QA Engineer with experience in FinTech and E-commerce. Worked across the full product quality stack, including backend, API, web, and mobile testing, with hands-on experience in automation, regression strategy, release quality, and incident investigation. I combine strong technical depth with cross-functional leadership: I have led teams, driven high-impact initiatives, and improved quality visibility through metrics and observability. During a career break, I built and shipped two iOS applications, which strengthened my understanding of mobile development and the full product delivery lifecycle.
Experience
Career Break
Nov 2025 - PresentIndie iOS Developer
- Designed, developed, and launched two iOS applications from scratch: Timefall and Quietude.
- 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.
Senior QA Engineer / Team Lead
May 2023 - Oct 2025Uzum Market (Leading Marketplace in Uzbekistan)
Acting Team Lead
May 2025 - Oct 2025- Managed a cross-functional team 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, reducing a legacy backlog of 100+ bugs to near zero, which helped reduce technical debt and improve release predictability and product stability.
- Integrated admin panel development into the team domain instead of treating it as outsourced support work, which reduced the backlog of unsupported features and gave content and marketing teams more independence when operating new functionality.
- Acted as feature lead for a large-scale Pepsi campaign (500k+ new users) and a government-led social project.
Senior QA Engineer
May 2023 - Oct 2025- Built and maintained around 450 API automated tests in Java / Rest Assured, reducing regression time from 2 days to 3 hours.
- Led the complete overhaul and expansion of the product's anti-fraud system, reducing fraud losses during marketing campaigns from $5,000/day to near zero.
- Actively worked on key integrations with Uzum Nasiya (installment service) and Uzum Tezkor (food delivery service), helping deliver and stabilize high-impact product flows.
- 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, significantly reducing support requests, and increasing the marketing team's trust in the tool so they could run stronger and more effective campaigns.
- Worked with analysts to eliminate systemic data collection issues, improving the reliability of product metrics and reporting.
- Mentored new QA engineers, using AI tools to accelerate test preparation, analyze server-side and mobile logs, and speed up investigation work.
- Actively used Kibana and Grafana for incident investigation, log analysis, and detecting hidden issues in integration-heavy scenarios.
QA Engineer
Sep 2021 - Apr 2023Otkritie Broker
- Progressed to Senior QA within 1.5 years through high autonomy and strong 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.