Engineering Fundamentals: Algorithms Are Money

Evgeny Kozlov works at T-Bank on Statist, a product analytics platform, and leads the team responsible for its microservices, data, storage, and APIs. With Alexander Polomodov, he traces his path from a small town in the Bryansk region to platform engineering and engineering management.

The conversation makes a case for fundamentals: C, memory management, algorithms, and databases reveal the limits hidden by high-level abstractions. Evgeny taught himself Ruby on Rails and Java, began as a backend engineer in custom development, became his company's first Ruby specialist, and went deep into event-driven systems.

As the Russian Ruby market contracted, hiring tied to a specific stack became a barrier. He joined T-Bank through a general software engineering interview. His team first built performance analytics for client applications, then used that experience to create a ClickHouse-based product analytics alternative to Amplitude.

Statist grew from a small-team prototype and gigabytes of data to hundreds of terabytes, exceeding a petabyte with replicas. After returning as team lead, Evgeny took ownership of the technical backlog and team growth. The next challenge is serving external customers through multitenancy, observability, and automated SRE practices.