Category: Blog
Join Me at Swiftype!
18 Sep2013

As you may have heard, last January I have joined Swiftype – an early stage startup focused on changing local site search for the better. It has been a blast for the past 8 months, we have done a lot of interesting things to make our infrastructure more stable and performant, immensely increased visibility into our performance metrics, developed a strong foundation for the future growth of the company. Now we are looking to expand our team with great developers and technical operations people to push our infrastructure and the product even further.

Since I have joined Swiftype, I have been mainly focused on improving the infrastructure through better automation and monitoring, and worked on our backend code. Now I am looking for a few good operations engineers to join my team to work on a few key projects like building a new multi-datacenter infrastructure, creating a new data storage for our documents data, improving high-availability of our core services and much more.

To help us improve our infrastructure we are looking both for senior operations engineers and for more junior techops people that we could help grow and develop within the company. Both positions could be either remote or we could assist you with relocation to San Francisco if you want to work in our office.

If you are interested, you can take a look at an old, but still pretty relevant post I wrote many years ago on what I believe an ops candidate should know. And, of course, if you have any questions regarding these positions in Swiftype, please email me at kovyrin@swiftype.com or use any other means for contacting me and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. If you know someone who may be a great fit for these positions, please let them know!


New Chapter: Swiftype
31 Jan2013

So, after a few weeks of looking for a new job I’m really excited to start my journey in a young, but very ambitious startup called Swiftype which is focused on developing a technology for private site search, that could be used on everything from small blogs to large product sites. The company is growing really fast and I’m going to lead all the work on infrastructure, build the ops team and hope to get a chance to do some coding along the way.

Stay tuned – I really hope to finally get a chance to do more blogging this year. 🙂


Looking for a New Gig
14 Jan2013

As of today I’m no longer working for LivingSocial and I’m looking for the next thing to work on. Since my family is in Toronto and I have an apartment (mortgage) here, I’m not looking to relocate and currently looking for something remote (I have 7+ years of remote work experience) or something local in Toronto.

For more information on my background, please check my Github profile, my linkedin profile or the resume section on this blog. If you need to contact me, feel free to use any channels listed on the contacts page.

Update: After a few initial interviews I’d like to update this post with a bit more details on what I’m looking for in the new position.

First of all, I’m really not sure I want to be yet another ops engineer working on “everything ops” in my next company. If I’d be to join a company as a regular ops engineer, I’d prefer it to be a clearly defined role with a clear focus on some set of challenging problems. I’m honestly tired of setting up cacti/nagios/chef at this point and would like the job to be a little bit more challenging.

Though even more I’m interested in being able to make strategic technical decisions for an operations team and apply my experience and knowledge for solving challenging tasks with a dedicated team of ops engineers. This could be anything from a tech ops team lead role (in a medium/large companies) to a director of technical operations (in a small-to-medium sized startups).

Update: Ok, I’ve found a new job – I work for Swiftype now!


Cool Web Designer is Looking for Work
18 Jul2010

My wife – a good web designer with 6 years of experience with web design, HTML and CSS is looking for a job. Here is some information about her:

We’re physically located in Toronto, Canada, but she has a great experience of working remotely too. So, if you need a web designer or a junior web designer, feel free to contact Tanya.


The Blog v.2.0
20 Jul2009

Long time ago, in 2002 I decided to create my own point of presence in the Internet. Back then I’ve got pretty nice domain (scoundrel.kremenchug.net), hacked up a few pages on php, added a guestbook and that was it. Many years it was almost static and I did a few updates on my resume page few times a year. Later I’ve switched the site to wordpress to make it easier to manage my resume and stuff

And 3 years ago in March 2006 I’ve decided to start my own blog. I took a standard template and started the blog on a separate domain while the domain was on its own domain name… This spring my wife made me a great birthday present – she’s created me a custom blog design that has all the stuff I wanted from my own web site for a long time. My friend Dima Shteflyuk has helped me with creating a wordpress template from Tanya’s mockups and here we are – now I’ve decided to merge my blog and my web site into a single web entity called http://kovyrin.net/. Welcome to my new blog/site/whatever!