Hello, my name is Timofei Sablin or just Tim.

You probably found this page researching me as a professional, so I’ll take a moment to speak of my career journey. Follow the links below to get to know me more as a person.

My journey commenced in technical support (then app support) in investment banking just before graduating from university, but fueled by aspirations that always aimed towards working in “true” tech. By 2016, I joined a team of system engineers dedicated to driving a digital transformation in eCommerce at a time when the term “DevOps” was in full blow. Our endeavours there revolved around cloud migration, CI/CD automation, some backend development, and fortifying security within public cloud environments. Noteworthy projects during this phase involved contributing to the release engineering of @knime (https://twitter.com/knime) in the life sciences industry and architecting a batch file conversion system from the grounds up for Entatio as a side project.

Building on these experiences, around 2019, just before the onset of COVID, a pivotal decision was made by me to fully embrace remote work—a pretty unconventional choice at the time. The desire to explore more with my family and break free from the traditional office setting became increasingly compelling. This transition proved challenging but rewarding, considering that few of my peers had fully adopted remote work. Admittedly, it felt pretty lonely being in this camp for a period of time.

Over the subsequent three years, my roles varied from being the sole DevOps connoisseur to contributing to engineering-only and mixed engineering teams, focusing on both integral aspects of products and maintaining essential infrastructure for the whole organization. This variety of experiences allowed me to delve more into Kubernetes and the CNCF landscape, deepen my expertise in cloud services, and gain better insights into telemetry and observability. Work infrequently involved more rigourous development, such as architecting and implementing a GitOps-based API at Findify. This Python-based backend solution simplified onboarding for the commercial team, automating client stack setups with built-in heuristics for resource allocation based on specific business contexts. Improving flow and reducing human error were the key points in that development.

My tenures during these years encompassed technical leadership responsibilities, during which I got involved in running the daily operational routines and reporting, understanding what shall be done for the team to work efficiently. One of the roles involved overseeing my peers' work by managing workloads, conducting one-on-ones, and crafting roadmaps, while the other was more focused on amplifying communication and the team’s achievements to the broader organization while managing their well-being. During that time, I’ve accumulated wisdom on learning how to keep things simple, work with humans… and optimize cloud costs – some learned the hard way!

In recent years, my focus has centred on endorsing the “developer experience” paradigm in platform engineering roles. To me, DevX extends beyond just improving delivery speed or ensuring a swift “fail fast” approach in pipelines. It embodies an idea that developers can initiate their work seamlessly – no matter if it’s finding API components or putting together code as Lego blocks. Whether incorporating an internal developer platform to piece together their bricks or building Terraform modules for quick bootstrapping, where each element contributes to enhancing the initial moments of a developer’s workflow. Building inter-team trust, speaking a lot through “what we do as a team” and asking “how we can we help?” seasoned with some good documentation on top is and will be the key to success in such teams.

Read more about my life philosophy and why this website is named like this.

Current Habitat

Matosinhos, Portugal

Curriculum Vitae

Most most up-to-date professional resume is available here.

Get in touch with me