Julik Tarkhanov

Hire me

I’m Julik, a software engineer with over 20 years of experience who combines deep technical expertise with proven leadership skills. I help companies navigate complex technical challenges while building sustainable, maintainable systems.

I offer hands-on engineering leadership; a combination of staff-level engineer work and engineering management. Depending on the size of your business, I can also take the role of the fractional CTO.

I may be able to help you on a short engagement. Interested? Book a free orientation call!

My approach

My experience spans from early-stage startups to established companies, and I’ve learned that the most valuable contributions come from:

  • Understanding the full context of technical decisions and their business impact
  • Working with existing systems rather than insisting on rewrites
  • Reducing complexity instead of adding new technologies
  • Building sustainable processes that scale with your team

Why work with me

I combine technical depth with strategic thinking. Unlike consultants who only provide recommendations, I can both architect solutions and implement them. Unlike pure developers, I understand the business context and team dynamics that drive technical decisions.

I love existing codebases. Many companies struggle with legacy systems that have grown organically. I excel at understanding complex systems quickly and identifying the issues that are holding back growth.

I help reduce technology debt. Startups often accumulate unnecessary complexity as they grow. I help identify what you actually need versus what’s adding overhead, reducing both technical and operational stress.

Values you can benefit from

Less tech is better. Rails is a prime engine for having less technology over more. Do you really need 3 different data storage systems? Do you really need a complex architecture? Does it add value? I know how to get teams and businesses to perform better using less tech. Usually just a single database, a single source of truth, and a single architectural concept is all you need.

Rails is great for LLMs. I use and apply LLMs in my work, and I can give guidance on how to do it effectively. Rails (and even plain Ruby) is great for use with LLMs due to terseness – there is less code to ingest. When building modern libraries, I structure documentation in such a way that LLMs can be productive with those libraries from the very first prompt.

Merging services back together is fine. Microservices are great when investor money is ample and your team is growing. When the market gets tight, and you want to accomplish more with less staff and fewer servers, rebundling your microservices into a monolith can be a great approach. I have experience in amalgamating services back into larger applications and I know that this approach is just as valid as the initial microservice extraction.

Mentorship is built into my work. I believe the best solutions are those that leave your team stronger and more capable. Every engagement includes knowledge transfer and skill development.

I don’t need to redo a system to fix it. “Who has done this?” is a question often heard when a project needs help. Coming from a long career in film, I know that deadlines, budget constraints, and other pressures have got you to where you are now. And if you need your app fixed – it did its job, and it is to be respected – not scolded. That’s fine! I can do surgical interventions in codebases without trying to do sweeping rework rounds.

I know when to go off the rails. There are playbooks for everything these days. Prescribed architectures, “do not do HTTP requests in your tests”, “small methods are better”, “everything must be TypeScript” – but playbooks only accommodate the known. I know when to take the side alley to get to the goal quicker, and do so with care and expertise.

Recent work & impact

  • At WeTransfer I built high-throughput storage services and managed the team responsible, helping reduce cloud infrastructure costs by a significant margin.
  • At Cheddar I have implemented multiple key features and managed the web/backend engineering team of 4, including regular 1:1s, mentorship and performance management. I helped the team ship features 3× faster by implementing better testing practices and reducing technical debt and I streamlined deployment processes from nearly an hour to single-digit minutes.
  • At Cora I optimized fleet utilization by a factor of 2 and implemented robust, atomic processing workflows.
  • For a startup in the entertainment space I have established guidelines for web performance measurement, improved the UI experience and advised the founder on optimal approaches to the topic.
  • For a startup in the media space I implemented substantial extensions to ActiveStorage, a custom media player, and a custom vector paint engine.
  • Across multiple engagements I have implemented incident reporting procedures based on the “contributing factors” methodology and ensured teams followed that process throughout years of consistent improvement. I also added smoke tests of different flavors to systems, ensuring maximum test coverage with just a few directed checks.

I’m a good fit for your business if:

  • You’re open to having your decision-makers work directly with me for maximum effectiveness.
  • You wish to get everything out of the Ruby/Rails stack you already run on.
  • …or to start a new initiative with a lean Ruby-based setup
  • You’re open to other forms of collaboration than full-time employment.

Technical expertise

Areas of Focus:

  • High-performance web applications and APIs
  • Frontend architecture for delightful user experience (it doesn’t always require React), lightweight UIs
  • Database optimization and data processing
  • Background job systems and distributed computing
  • File processing and streaming systems

Languages, Frameworks, Ecosystems:

  • Ruby with and without Rails (20+ years)
  • JavaScript, Go, Crystal, and the ecosystems around them
  • GCP and AWS for web product development (queues, databases, VMs)

Open Source: I built and maintain several widely-used libraries including:

Let’s talk

If you’re facing technical challenges that need both deep expertise and strategic thinking, I’d love to discuss how I can help. Whether it’s:

  • Analyzing and improving an existing codebase
  • Building or mentoring an engineering team
  • Reducing technology complexity and operational overhead
  • Solving performance or scalability issues

Send me an email or find me on X to start a conversation about your needs.

Available for freelance engagements and consulting projects. Based in the Netherlands, working remotely with teams worldwide.