Pavel Pravosud — Staff Software Engineer & Tech Lead

Summary

Staff software engineer and tech lead specializing in payments and platform infrastructure. At Stripe, led the launch of ACH Debit, the company’s second-largest payment method by volume, and serve on the API Review team that governs public API design. Previously built Heroku’s cross-service event-delivery platform; maintainer of widely used Ruby open-source libraries including jbuilder and multi_json.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Engineering Lead

2019 – Present

Stripe

Led a team of 6–10 engineers designing and launching Stripe’s debit payment methods, including ACH Debit, which processed over $4 billion in pay-in volume in 2024.
Reviewed and approved 60+ public API changes on Stripe’s API Review team, authoring 10+ myself, to keep the public API consistent and maintainable.
Drove incident response on high-severity production issues, preventing financial loss, exposing fraud, and restoring service quickly.
Mentored newly hired engineers through structured onboarding and hands-on coaching.
Owned engineering for compliance audits, managing technical requirements, coordinating cross-functional teams, and driving remediation to deadline.

Principal Software Engineer

2015 – 2019

Heroku/Salesforce

Architected and launched Eventbus, a real-time event-delivery system adopted across multiple services for inter-service communication.
Built real-time monitoring and alerting for Eventbus, surfacing latency and throughput to keep it reliable at scale.
Shipped Eventbus client libraries in several languages, driving adoption across the platform.
Re-architected API rate limiting on the Generic Cell Rate Algorithm (GCRA), raising throughput ~140% and roughly halving p99 latency while eliminating manual token replenishment; open-sourced as redis-gcra.

Senior Software Engineer

2013 – 2015

Hashrocket

Delivered Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and PostgreSQL applications for a consultancy’s diverse client base, with strong testing and code-quality discipline.
Authored and maintained widely used open-source Ruby libraries, including mock5, authem, adequate_exposure, natural_sort, normalize_url, and nestive.

Skills

Languages

Ruby, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript

Frameworks & Libraries

Ruby on Rails, Node.js, React, Tailwind CSS

Data & Infrastructure

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, AWS, Terraform

Domains & Practice

Distributed Systems, Event-Driven Architecture, API Design, GraphQL, Payments Infrastructure, Rate Limiting, Incident Response, Technical Leadership

Open Source

jbuilder

Ships with Rails · 300M+ downloads

multi_json

Ruby JSON adapter · 1.1B+ downloads

Education

BSc in Communication Systems

Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics (MTUCI), Moscow

2003 – 2008