---
sidebar_position: 2
tags: [career, graphql, go, platform-engineering, startups]
---
(2017 - 2022)

<img src="../img/Pipedrive_logo.jpg" width="300" />

[Pipedrive](https://www.pipedrive.com/) was founded in 2010 in Tallinn by a group of salespeople and developers who lacked a convenient CRM for their everyday work. The company started with visual sales-pipeline management and grew into an international SaaS platform for sales and marketing used by small and medium-sized companies. In 2020, Vista Equity Partners acquired a controlling stake in Pipedrive, accelerating its international development; the company became one of Estonia's unicorn startups.

- Global market, SaaS for sales and marketing
- Product idea: a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople
- Headquarters in New York and Tallinn, with an international team

## Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Platform

- Mission lead for GraphQL subscriptions (~4 developers x 3 months)
- Launchpad lead for the high-load core-services team (cross-team communication, reviews, backlog grooming, on-call; ~12 developers x 6 months)
- Interviewer and onboarding mentor (system-design stage, 4+ hour video)
- Improved observability of core services
- Developer on the mission to update GraphQL in the billing stack
- Developer on the mission to rework GraphQL in user overview
- Initiator and member of the GraphQL guild council (cross-team schema evolution)
- Led the open-source direction ([graphql-schema-registry](https://github.com/pipedrive/graphql-schema-registry))
- Actively communicated across teams and the guild

Gained experience in:
- Kafka, Redis Sentinel, PromQL

![](en/about/img/Pipedrive-people-with-president-Alar-Karis.jpg)

![](en/about/img/i-vTBkj7W-4K.jpg)

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## Senior Software Engineer, Core Tribe

- Mission lead for API composition, introducing a federated GraphQL layer (~4 developers x 3 months)
- Mission lead for API performance improvements (~2 developers x 2 months)
- Served as solution architect when reviewing mission outcomes
- Developer on the mission to stabilize the Mailigen product after its acquisition (campaigns)
- Developer on the mission to split up the PHP monolith and dockerize it
- Built a desktop-app proof of concept with Electron
- Contributed to the team's services:
  - WebSocket event-delivery service
  - client-data migration service between data centers
  - request-routing service
  - logging, linting and other libraries
  - back office as a platform
  - frontend web app as a platform

Gained experience in:
- Project leadership
- Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic
- Frontend: React, Redux
- Backend: Go, Gin
- Pipedrive + FB Messenger integration hackathon

![](en/about/img/1670441670387.jpg)

## Senior Software Engineer, Marketplace (Indigo) team

- Developed the Pipedrive Marketplace catalog, OAuth server and app manager
- Supported high-load webhook services (encryption)
- Improved the API reference page (Swagger UI, search)

Gained experience in:
- Developing high-load microservices
- Backend: Node, ES6, Redis, Consul, Docker
- Frontend: React, Scss
- QA: Sinon, Mocha, Jest
- Monitoring: New Relic, Prometheus

![](en/about/img/1670441310936.jpg)

![](en/about/img/1670441423216.jpg)

![](en/about/img/1668505831479.jpg)

![](en/about/img/1668505795821.jpg)