# Igor Katsuba

**Staff / principal platform engineer** — developer platform · AI agent infrastructure · production reliability
Valencia, Spain · igor@katsuba.dev · https://katsuba.dev

I own the parts of a product nobody else is on call for — the authorization test corpus, the CI/CD and release path, the incident root cause, the internal agent platform — and I build the teams that keep owning them after me. Twelve years in TypeScript and Angular, six at staff+ across fintech and legal-tech. I diagnose the production failures other people file as "the database is slow" down to the specific lock, snapshot or predicate, and I fix the class rather than the instance.

## Leadership

- **hiring** — 300+ interviews across levels. At Tinkoff I owned the Angular hiring track and kept the bar consistent across a pool of twenty interviewers; at Plata Card I hired into the platform team. Hiring capacity that depends on you being in the room is not capacity.
- **teams** — Led the frontend platform team at Plata Card, and mentored engineers at both companies. A platform is adopted or routed around depending on how much time you spend with the teams using it.
- **forums** — Started the weekly internal talks at Tinkoff, then again at Plata Card — a standing venue for defending a design and spreading what you learned, rather than knowledge moving only through whoever sits nearby. The first one outlived my tenure.
- **review** — Review is the half of mentoring that leaves a trace. On my current team I am the most consistent source of it, and where a review finds something real I go into the fix rather than leaving a comment.

## Skills

- **languages** — TypeScript · Node.js · Swift · Deno
- **backend** — NestJS · Next.js App Router · MikroORM · Prisma · BullMQ · better-auth
- **postgres** — lock semantics · MVCC and xmin horizons · autovacuum · RLS · trigram indexes · connection-pool failure modes
- **agents** — Anthropic Agent SDK and Managed Agents · Vercel eve · Mastra · MCP servers and OAuth proxying · sandboxed execution · durable event logs
- **infrastructure** — Terraform · Cloud Run · Cloud SQL · Cloud Armor · IAM · GKE Autopilot · BigQuery · Vercel · Railway
- **delivery** — GitHub Actions · Dagger · migration validation and rollback · human-approved production gates
- **testing** — Playwright at corpus scale · Vitest · testcontainers · deterministic seeders · CI sharding
- **frontend** — Angular, twelve years — Material 3 library authoring, zoneless, signals, CDK overlay, DI internals · React · Tailwind
- **monorepo** — Nx · Turborepo · remote caching · pipeline acceleration

## Experience

### ManifestLabs — Platform Team · 2025 —

Legal-tech SaaS. The platform, the release path, the incident root cause, and the company's internal AI agent platform.

- Root-caused a full production outage — a migration's ALTER TABLE stuck behind an orphaned transaction, poisoning the Postgres lock queue until the connection pool went with it — then fixed the class with bounded timeouts at the migration-session layer.
- Traced a three-day, traffic-independent database CPU climb to one long-open transaction pinning the xmin horizon, and named the single metric that catches it in an hour rather than three days.
- Built the internal AI agent platform end to end as sole author: Slack and web surfaces, per-user MCP OAuth, sandboxed multi-agent execution, and a durable event log that fixed chat resume losing turns.
- Wrote the authorization end-to-end corpus the org now regresses against, and the CI that runs it — including a guard that fails the build when the test seeder drifts from the schema.
- Owned the CI/CD rebuild as sole engineer, from quality gates through migration validation and rollback to human-approved production deploys.
- Built the shared agent toolchain the engineering org runs on — skills and codebase rules for incident triage, safe data access, testing and release.
- The team's most consistent reviewer, by a wide margin, in a codebase where the median merged change never gets a human comment.

### Plata Card — Principal Engineer · Frontend Platform Lead · 2022–2025

Consumer fintech. Led the frontend platform team and built the foundation every frontend product shipped on, from the internal CRM to the public site.

- Led the platform team and owned the shared foundation — architecture, build and release tooling, the component and design-system layer — across every frontend surface the company had.
- Hired into the team and ran interviews end to end.
- Started the weekly internal talks, so design decisions got argued in the open instead of in direct messages.
- Supported the product teams building on the platform: the consulting half of the job, and the reason the foundation was adopted rather than routed around.

_Proprietary work — little of it has a public trace._

### Tinkoff — Staff Engineer · Frontend Platform · 2020–2022

Built the company's frontend platform. Parts were released as open source, which is the visible tenth of it.

- Built platform systems rather than product features: an in-house error-monitoring service and its browser client, analytics systems, a micro-frontend framework, and the shared build tooling underneath.
- Led Angular hiring — owned the interview track and kept the bar consistent across a pool of twenty interviewers.
- Started the weekly talks and knowledge-sharing meeting, which outlived my tenure.
- Carried the review load on the shared repositories every other team depended on — my heaviest review years.

### Fix Group — Senior Frontend Developer · 2018–2020

Product frontend, and the first tooling I owned rather than used.

### RTLabs — Frontend Developer · 2014–2018

Where I started — large government-scale web applications.

## Speaking

- [Repository evolution: from simple to complex](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqV863ysMRQ) — Frontend Conf 2021
- [Extreme Pipeline Acceleration](https://youtu.be/j0OhmZeAoKQ) — CodeFest Russia 2022
- [It's all about Nx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-JwmfQKfIE) — Podlodka 2022

Plus written work on frontend and infrastructure at https://katsuba.dev/articles, and a Telegram channel on Angular.

## Elsewhere

- [GitHub](https://github.com/IKatsuba)
- [Telegram](https://t.me/Katsuba)
- [X](https://x.com/katsuba_igor)