Open to Staff Engineer / Frontend Lead roles

Sergei Kaniukov

Staff Frontend Engineer · Engineering Lead

Nine years building web products, five leading the people who build them. I own frontend architecture end to end — real-time apps, TypeScript at scale, Vue and React — and stay hands-on in the codebase while the team grows around it. Currently leading an 8-team engineering stream at Brainrocket.

Valencia, Spain EU-based · remote or hybrid RU · EN · ES
Sergei Kaniukov

What I'm looking for

Scope
Staff / Lead, product-facing

Owning the frontend of a product line: architecture, standards, delivery — with room to keep writing code.

Domain
Real-time & interactive web

WebSocket, WebRTC, canvas games, TV and multi-screen apps. Products where latency is the feature.

Team
5–30 engineers

Led both a tight 8-team engineering stream and a 30-person cross-functional org across web, backend and mobile.

Selected work

Web · real-time multiplayer

Festa Games

Party games played in the browser across several devices at once. Built the client architecture around a live game loop — room state over WebSocket, voice and video over WebRTC, rendering in Pixi.

festa.games ↗
Role
Tech lead & principal developer
Stack
Vue 3 TypeScript WebSocket WebRTC Pixi.js
Web + TV app

Partystation

One product, two very different clients: a browser app and a smart-TV app driven from phones in the room. Shared a typed domain layer between them and kept the socket session authoritative on the TV screen.

partystation.tv ↗
Role
Tech lead & principal developer
Stack
Vue 3 TypeScript WebSocket TV platforms

Impact, measured

−60%

Mobile LCP, after partnering with Product to split desktop and mobile asset pipelines.

−50%

QA returns (and −30% reported defects), once code review, style and architecture standards became mandatory.

−60% / −20%

Implementation time on small tasks / major features, after introducing Claude Code into the workflow.

4 apps

Migrated Vue 2 Options API → Vue 3 Composition API in three months, plus a shared Storybook component library.

3.5 → 3 wks

Feature time-to-market, after adding Figma design reviews at the UX and UI stages.

1 mo → 2 wks

Engineering onboarding time, via a structured plan, access checklist and day-one provisioning.

Experience

Mar 2025 — present
Team Lead, Engineering Stream (Frontend & Backend) — Brainrocket
Valencia, Spain · entertainment · 6,000+ people · promoted from developer
  • Lead 8 cross-functional frontend and backend teams, owning technical direction, delivery quality and team growth.
  • Own architecture, scalability and performance across React and Vue.js products; guide trade-offs on complex production issues.
  • Established code review, engineering standards and reusable technical foundations; coordinate CI/CD, releases and rollback strategy with Backend and DevOps.
  • Drove adoption of Claude Code and AI-assisted workflows for development, refactoring and automation, including E2E test generation for UI validation across multiple locales.
Sep 2023 — Mar 2025
Engineering Manager — Renaissance Insurance
Moscow, Russia · insurance & travel · 4,000+ people · promoted from developer
  • Led a cross-functional team of 30 developers, owning technical direction, delivery and growth; empowered tech leads to own architecture decisions.
  • Owned React and Vue.js architecture, scalability and performance; drove engineering standards, CI/CD and AI-assisted development.
  • Led the migration of four production applications from Vue 2 Options API to Vue 3 Composition API within three months, improving development speed by 10–15%.
May 2021 — Sep 2023
Engineering Manager — SVK.Digital
Moscow, Russia · travel, ticketing & entertainment · 100+ people · promoted from developer
  • Led and developed a frontend engineering team while staying technically hands-on; owned technical direction and architecture across React and Vue.js applications.
  • Turned product requirements into practical engineering plans with Product and stakeholders; established code review and development practices that improved maintainability.
  • Mentored engineers and helped developers grow into broader technical ownership.
Apr 2018 — May 2021
Frontend Developer — SVK.Digital
Moscow, Russia
  • Built and shipped production web applications, games and platforms using Vue.js, JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS.
  • Developed responsive interfaces and reusable frontend components; improved frontend performance and architecture.

Toolkit

Engineering
TypeScript JavaScript React 19 Vue 2 / 3 Node.js HTML / CSS WebGL GraphQL concepts Vite · Webpack Git
Leading
Architecture & strategy Hiring Performance management Org design Coaching & mentoring Product partnership CI/CD & reliability Claude Code / AI workflows
Based between
Valencia ⇄ Madrid

Open to on-site, hybrid or remote across the EU — and happy to travel for the right team.

Sergei Kaniukov in Madrid

Hiring for a staff or lead role?

Happy to walk through the Festa Games architecture, the Vue 3 migration, or how the AI-assisted workflow actually landed with the team.