Open to a lot of things!

Semyon Ulankov

Frontend Engineer — product UI, i18n infrastructure, developer tooling

Remote

Summary

Frontend engineer who cares about polished, thoughtful UI — the details, the CSS, the edge cases — and about the engineering underneath it: shared component architecture, refactoring, tooling and tests. Deep specialization in i18n infrastructure as an engineering problem rather than translation: typed pipelines, static analysis in CI, grammar-aware localization. Used to working as a self-directed engineer in an async product team — taking things from a fuzzy idea to production and steady state.

Experience

Frontend Engineer

2025 — Present

SongsterrRemote

Popular guitar tablature service with a multi-million user audience. Product frontend across the whole surface — interactive UI, component architecture, experiments, tooling — plus deep ownership of the i18n platform, in an async remote team.

  • Refactored the app's floating UI into a single useFloatingDropdown hook, replacing per-component portal boilerplate across selects, tuning editors and settings panels.
  • Redesigned complex product UI: drum notation with responsive mobile layout and contextual help, the AI regeneration panel, refreshed toast notifications.
  • Own the frontend i18n platform: ten-plus languages across hundreds of components on a unified gettext/.po workflow with type-safe codegen and grammar-aware word order.
  • Designed and shipped a locale-import static analyzer with auto-fix, wired into the CI of multiple services — eliminating a class of "silent English fallback" bugs.
  • Led subsystem refactors: centralized notification localization across hundreds of files, moved locale resolution out of a Web Worker, split translations into lazy-loaded domains.
  • Ran product A/B experiments end-to-end — from experiment settings and UI to asset optimization (PNG → WebP → inline SVG) and analytics.
  • Delivered beyond the web app: Mocha test suites for domain logic, internal MCP server features (TypeScript service code with tests), iOS/Android user-testing support.

TypeScript · Preact · SSR · CSS Modules · Web Workers · gettext/.po · Mocha / Playwright

Full-stack Developer

2022 — Present

Top NevestaRemote

Fashion and beauty center. Sole developer of the website, working directly with the business owners — from fuzzy requirements to production: migrated the site to Next.js 14 + TypeScript (App Router, static export) with galleries, SEO metadata and a full 301 migration of the old URL structure; integrated online booking, gift certificates and analytics. Keep evolving and maintaining it.

Next.js · TypeScript · React · SCSS · static export

Full-stack Developer

2022 — Present

SmartStatRemote

Manufacturer of electrochemical research equipment. Sole developer of the online catalog on WordPress + WooCommerce, working directly with the manufacturer: built the cart and checkout flow, keep improving catalog UX, set up a PostCSS pipeline and a Dockerized local environment.

WordPress · WooCommerce · PHP · PostCSS · Docker

Listed here are only the projects I still run today — there have been others along the way. Outside of client work I also build systems and modules for FoundryVTT (so far for my own tabletop campaigns and friends) and localize tabletop rulebooks, games and guides from English to Russian, communicating with their authors in English along the way.

Skills

  • Core

    • TypeScript (strict)
    • React / Preact
    • Node.js (services, MCP)
    • SSR
    • Semantic HTML, accessibility
    • CSS Modules / SCSS / LESS
    • Tailwind / Bootstrap
    • Design systems, component libraries
    • Web Workers (Comlink)

  • Internationalization

    • i18n/l10n at scale
    • gettext / .po workflow
    • Type-safe translation codegen
    • Grammar-aware localization
    • Music-domain localization

  • Tooling & quality

    • Static analysis / auto-fix tooling
    • CI standards enforcement
    • Playwright / Mocha / Cypress
    • Performance optimization (assets, bundle, rendering)
    • LLM-assisted engineering: agent workflows, code verification

  • Product engineering

    • A/B experiments
    • Mixpanel / Sentry
    • MCP servers

Languages

  • Russian — native
  • English — professional working proficiency
  • Ukrainian — passive proficiency — understand, don't speak
  • Belarusian — basic, partial understanding
  • German — elementary
  • Norwegian — elementary