• Phone: +44 7722 850063
• Email: colonelcolt@gmail.com
• Location: London, GB
• GitHub: Yury-Zakharov
• LinkedIn: uzakharov

Senior .NET backend engineer and technical leader with 15+ years of experience designing high-integrity, large-scale regulated systems, financial platforms, and distributed architectures. Expert in C#, domain-driven design, contract-first API development, and functional-inspired code. Proven track record of modernizing volatile legacy codebases, enhancing system correctness, and elevating team engineering standards across UK and international markets. Seeking remote-first Senior Backend or Technical Lead positions.

Nov 2025 – present

• Delivering independent technical analysis, architectural proofs-of-concept, and deep-dive research into .NET 10 performance optimizations.

• Developing commercial-grade, open-source compliance validation engines and local-first developer tooling to ensure data correctness in distributed environments.

• Engineering highly resilient, zero-cloud-dependency backend prototypes utilizing advanced declarative and specification-driven design patterns.

• Evaluating and designing specification-driven development workflows utilizing autonomous AI agents to automate contract verification and accelerate compliance testing.

Mar 2019 – Oct 2025

UK market leader in financial advice software. Senior backend engineer on regulated, business-critical platform operating across UK, Australia and USA. Collaborative technical leader in 10-person team focused on legacy modernisation, contract clarity, system correctness and developer productivity.

• Introduced contract-first development across cross-functional teams, reducing integration defects by 5% and accelerating API delivery timelines.

• Extended in-house domain-specific language with SQL backend, improving developer productivity and broadening ORM support

• Formalised Swagger/OpenAPI integration testing, removing ~10% of low-value tests and greatly improving stability and confidence

• Mentored engineers and ran internal sessions on functional design and system correctness, raising team capability and engineering standards

• Pioneered the safe adoption and governance of GitHub Copilot within the backend engineering team, establishing best practices that accelerated delivery lifecycles while maintaining strict architectural patterns.

Apr 2018 – Mar 2019

Contract backend engineer delivering integration and compliance projects for three regulated financial institutions.

• Allen & Overy. Designed DMS integration components and incremental validation to de-risk migration

• Mizuho. Led FIX protocol enhancements to achieve full MIFID II compliance for trading system

• Vanquis Bank. Delivered integration to new credit-scoring system as part of major platform renovation

Oct 2017 – Apr 2018

International energy trading organisation. Senior backend developer maintaining business-critical gas and energy trading systems.

• Delivered core trading features and minimized technical debt through systematic refactoring and static analysis while maintaining strict system stability.

• Substantially improved the testability and operational reliability of backend services integrated with Xoserve Gemini and OpenLink Endur.

Sept 2015 – Oct 2017

Financial services company specialising in FX products. Backend and integration developer on client-facing online FX trading platform.

• Integrated platform with Barclays FX using FIX 4.2, reducing order execution latency from minutes to milliseconds

• Automated SWIFT reconciliation processes, cutting manual work from hours to seconds

• Designed and introduced CI solution, significantly reducing production risk and deployment time

• Migrated data from bespoke CRM to Microsoft Dynamics

May 2014 – Sept 2015

Global risk management and financial services consultancy. Senior developer on large modular enterprise financial platform.

• Contributed to architecture and development of modular platform integrating multiple internal products

• Maintained high automated test coverage and promoted coding standards

• Worked with QA to improve system reliability and release confidence

Jan 2000 – May 2014

Backend-focused engineering roles spanning banking, corporate analytics, and high-volume enterprise systems.

• Architected and delivered data-intensive backend integrations, messaging infrastructure, and relational database systems.

• Championed early automation, continuous integration, and rigid testing standards across legacy software environments.

Backend Engineering (.NET): Expert – C#, .NET, .NET Core, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core, Web APIs, REST, OpenAPI, Swagger

Architecture & Design: Advanced – Backend Architecture, Domain Modelling, Modular Design, Legacy System Modernisation, API Design, Contract-First Development

Engineering Practices: Advanced – Declarative Design, Functional Programming Concepts, Specification-Driven Development, Testing and Verification, CI/CD, Developer Tooling, Typescript, Elm & Elm Architecture

Data & Integration: Advanced – SQL Server, Relational Databases, Messaging, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, System Integration, NHibernate, Entity Framework, Dapper

Cloud & Modern Practices: Working Knowledge – Azure, CI/CD pipelines, Microservices, Distributed Systems, Containerisation (Docker, Podman)

Financial Systems & Protocols: Working Knowledge – Financial Systems, Trading Systems, FIX Protocol (4.x), SWIFT Messaging, Settlement and Reconciliation, Low-Latency Systems, Regulated Environments

Certified SAFe® 6 Scrum Master: Scaled Agile