About me

Hi there! 👋

I'm a backend engineering leader with 9+ years of hands-on experience, currently serving as Head of Backend at SberEducation.

My focus today is on the management side — leading and growing engineering teams, hiring, and shaping technical strategy, while staying close to the code. I design software architectures driven by business needs and build distributed, robust, and fault-tolerant services on the JVM stack (Java / Kotlin).

Beyond backend, I work across frontend, mobile (Dart / Flutter), and increasingly ML and applied AI. That breadth has been especially useful in founding-engineer roles, where the job is to ship the whole product, not just one slice of it. Open to conversations about backend architecture, engineering leadership, and early-stage product building.

Along the way I contributed to architecture, design, integration and code base at Align Technology, Business Environment (SberBank), E-COM and VTB. At Oneum I was the founding engineer — designed the system end-to-end and brought the startup to production.

I hold a PhD candidacy from HSE University (defense pending).

Grab my resume here — CV, or reach out at the.mikhail.stepanov@gmail.com or on Telegram.

In my free time I'm a dog walker, amateur musician and sailor.