Open to a lot of things!

Semyon Ulankov

Software Engineer — interactive product UI, frontend architecture, i18n infrastructure

Remote

Summary

Software engineer who cares about polished, thoughtful UI — the details, the edge cases, how an interface behaves in a real user's hands — and about the engineering underneath it: reusable cores instead of copy-paste, architecture that keeps the UI responsive, backward compatibility as a deliberate decision, tests in every significant change. Currently working in the core of a complex interactive editor used by millions. Also built the i18n infrastructure for ten languages and treat it as an engineering problem rather than translation: typed pipelines and CI gates. 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

Software Engineer

2025 — Present

SongsterrRemote

Popular guitar tablature service with a multi-million user audience. I work on the core of the product's interactive editor — features that touch domain rules, the data model and rendering, not just screens — plus product experiments and the frontend i18n platform, in an async remote team.

  • Shipped a notation feature end-to-end across three repositories — file-import parsing in a separately versioned package, data model, editor UI, user docs and ten languages — with a deliberate backward-compatibility design so existing user content kept behaving exactly as before.
  • Designed a reusable core for a family of editor commands that move notes under real instrument constraints, and rebuilt three commands on top of it; the same logic drives both the command and the toolbar state, so controls are disabled exactly where the action would fail.
  • Built an interaction layer over an SVG-rendered document: clickable notation symbols that open the right editing tools (12 components, each with a component test), geometry-based mapping between symbols and data, and a hover preview showing what a toolbar command will affect.
  • Architected a read-only command preview computed in a Web Worker: runs against a throwaway copy of the document, renders through the production pipeline, defers expensive work so a user's click never waits behind a hover preview, and drops stale responses — in review.
  • Unified the app's floating UI — dropdowns, pickers, settings panels — behind a single shared hook, removing per-component boilerplate; redesigned complex notation UI with a responsive mobile layout and contextual help.
  • Built and maintain the i18n platform: ten languages across hundreds of components on a typed gettext/.po workflow with grammar-aware word order, plus a static analyzer with auto-fix and translation-quality tests wired into the CI of three services — turning a class of localization bugs from manual QA into automated gates.
  • Run product A/B experiments end-to-end — experiment design and exposure rules, UI, analytics attribution, e2e coverage and QA coordination — including source attribution for the subscription upgrade funnel.

TypeScript · Preact · SSR · SVG · Web Workers · CSS Modules · gettext/.po · Mocha / Playwright (e2e, component tests)

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)
    • SVG rendering, hit-testing

  • Architecture & domain logic

    • Domain algorithms under real-world constraints
    • Data model design, backward compatibility
    • File-format parsing, versioned package releases
    • Main-thread / worker architecture, deferred work, stale-response handling
    • Interaction layers over SVG

  • Internationalization

    • i18n/l10n at scale
    • gettext / .po workflow
    • Type-safe translation codegen
    • Grammar-aware localization
    • Translation-quality CI gates

  • Tooling & quality

    • Static analysis / auto-fix tooling
    • CI standards enforcement
    • Playwright (e2e, component tests) / Mocha / Cypress
    • Performance optimization (rendering, bundle, assets)
    • Bundle diagnostics (code-splitting)
    • LLM-assisted engineering: agent workflows, code verification, team skills

  • Product engineering

    • A/B experiments: exposure models, cleanup
    • Product analytics: Mixpanel, funnel attribution
    • 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