Nikita Talykov

QA Lead / Team Lead

Engineering leader with 9+ years in QA across cybersecurity, fintech and e-commerce. Went from manual tester to leading a QA department of 13 engineers, now leading a cross-functional team building the backend of a key T-Investments app screen. I get inspired when people happily use products I am responsible for.

talykov.jobs@yandex.ru talykov-nikita talykovnikita

Experience

Team Lead T-Investments (ex. Tinkoff Investments) 07/2025 - Present

Leading a cross-functional team of 5 (2 backend devs, 1 JS dev, 1 QA, 1 system analyst) building the backend of the "What to Buy" screen of the T-Investments mobile app
Led a full refactoring of the screen's backend: designed and launched a new service on a new stack using the BFF (backend-for-frontend) pattern
Unlocked new product features: personalized ML-powered collections and data streaming
Hired and onboarded a system analyst and a JS developer
Set team and individual goals; planned delivery and managed stakeholder expectations

QA Lead T-Investments (ex. Tinkoff Investments) 01/2023 - 01/2026

Leading a QA team of 13 engineers across several cross-functional teams: QA process ownership, goal setting, career planning
Introduced the test pyramid across the department, reducing lead time by 20%
Refactored the automated test suite, cutting runtime from 1.5+ hours to 20 minutes and eliminating test flakiness
Built a performance testing practice in the department (Java + Gatling), validating service reliability under load up to 1000 RPS
Established an experience-sharing program and a career development framework for QA engineers
Gamified the certification process for interns

Senior QA Automation Engineer OZON 01/2022 - 01/2023

Owned requirements testing and test planning
Functional testing of the WMS back-end (manual + automated: Python + PyTest + TestOps)
Built and maintained the automation framework
Developed a test data preparation service used by other teams and departments
Established QA processes for the agile team and the whole QA department
Conducted technical interviews; onboarded and mentored new engineers

QA Automation Engineer MAIL.RU Group 06/2021 - 01/2022

Functional and integration testing of payment processing services (Python + PyTest)
Organized load testing ahead of high-load sale seasons
Integrated automated tests into GitLab CI pipelines for the team's services
Reduced integration regression test runtime ~3x (from 1 hour to 20 minutes)

Test Engineer KASPERSKY 04/2017 - 06/2021

Manual functional testing of content filtering components (Web-AV, Anti-Banner, Do Not Track, Safe Payments, SSL traffic analysis)
Developed automated tests (C# + Selenium WebDriver)
Developed in-house tools that simplified manual testing
Owned testing of antivirus database updates
Analyzed automated test run results and provided reports to managers and the team

Education

Information Security Specialist (masters degree) Bauman Moscow State Technical University 2013 - 2019

Master degree and diploma with honours in information security.

Certified Tester Foundation Level International Software Testing Qualifications Board 2020

Certificate number: 76380

QA Lead course OTUS 05/2022 - 12/2022

Successfully finished QA Lead course with graduation project: "Reducing Lead Time by increasing the transparency of the testing process for the development team" Certificate

Manager Camp T-Education (internal T-Bank courses) 2025

Management training series: Managing Results, Managing Relationships, Managing Teams.

Skills

People management Hiring & interviewing Goal setting Career planning Stakeholder management Mentoring Python C# Java Pytest Selenium Selenide Junit Allure TestOps Spring Gatling Postgres Docker Kafka Quality control Bug reports Test design