About
My name is Oleg Sukharev. I've been in IT for over 15 years and help teams make products more stable, releases more predictable, and processes more efficient.
I started my career in the technical support team of a hosting provider, where I built a strong engineering foundation: networking, server administration, operations, and an understanding of how systems behave “in the wild.”
Career milestones
Since 2011 — QA, Scalr
Over 10 years I grew to QA Lead: built the QA function, formed and developed teams (manual + automation) up to 15 people, and introduced practices that improved quality and delivery speed. In parallel I consulted small companies, helping them set up processes, strengthen hiring, and build teams aligned with business goals.
Since 2021 — QA Lead, NeonLabs
Built a team of strong testers for a technically complex product — a new blockchain with high requirements for reliability, security, and performance.
Since 2024 — Head of Engineering
I manage the engineering organization, improve development processes, increase team throughput, and reduce time-to-market without sacrificing quality.
Expertise and core competencies
- Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go — for building testing tools, automated tests, and engineering utilities.
- Deep understanding of networking, operating systems, client-server architectures, and modern infrastructure services.
- Extensive experience in testing Web3 applications and blockchains (frontend + backend), excellent understanding of how blockchains work.
- Design and implementation of testing at all levels: unit, API, integration, UI/e2e, load/performance.
- Testing projects of any complexity — from classic web/service solutions to high-load and distributed systems.
- Testing strategy: quality goals, risk-based approach, readiness criteria, metrics, coverage, test pyramid, CI/CD approach.
- Strong engineering diagnostics: quickly localize issues, find root causes, and help the team turn “not reproducible” bugs into concrete technical causes and fixes.
- Building QA teams for product needs: hiring, onboarding, organizing structure (manual/automation/SDET, by domains, by streams), competency growth.
- Mentoring and growth for leads: setting expectations, career tracks, higher responsibility and autonomy.
- Improving processes within QA and cross-functionally (Dev, Product, DevOps): shorter feedback loops, higher transparency, better requirements quality, and more stable releases.