Ivan Kulagin

Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer

Upwork • Freelance

May 2011 - Present • 15 yrs 3 mos

I have 14+ years of proven experience on Upwork as a Senior Web Developer, System Architect, and DevOps Specialist. Having been a freelancer for my entire career, I have successfully delivered numerous long-term projects and short-term assignments, with 95% of my client base located in North America. My technical expertise bridges robust backend architectures, front-end user interfaces, and comprehensive DevOps operations. Throughout my freelance engagements, I have specialized in building complex systems and designing APIs that hide internal complexity while remaining highly functional for users. My core programming stack is built on over 14 years of Ruby development, alongside extensive hands-on experience with Python, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, and PL/pgSQL. On the infrastructure side, I design cloud environments and deployment pipelines using Terraform and Ansible. My deployment experience spans across major cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud, as well as managing and networking bare-metal servers. As a remote freelancer, I value clear requirements and efficient daily text reports over endless voice meetings. This self-organization allows me to take end-to-end responsibility for the products I build, from writing infrastructure as code to optimizing database queries and frontend styling. I heavily prioritize simple architectures, standard libraries, and hypermedia-driven approaches like Datastar or HTMX for snappy UIs, avoiding the complexity of heavy single-page application frameworks. Whether the task involves data scraping, detailed data normalization, advanced prompt engineering for AI integrations, or implementing strict testing on critical parts of the code, my ultimate goal is to deliver products to customers regularly without breaking existing functionality. I keep business logic decoupled from the delivery mechanism, adhering to low coupling and high cohesion to ensure long-term maintainability.