Changing careers to become a developer: stories from Kolesa Group engineers (opens in a new tab)
«While taking a course in my new role, I realized that working on the visual side of a website was what interested me.»
Open to opportunities · Remote
Hi, my name is
Bexultan KarabayevSenior Frontend Engineer
I build high-load web products with Vue 3 / Nuxt and React / TypeScript — and the architecture that survives a growing team.
Almaty, Kazakhstan
- 9years in professional development
- 1.5MMAU on the product I helped build
- 100+A/B tests shipped to production
- 433Klines of code migrated to FSD
About me
Senior Frontend Engineer with nine years of experience building high-load web products — from Kazakhstan’s largest real-estate marketplace, Krisha.kz (~1.5M MAU), to a multi-language EdTech platform.
I did not start out in engineering. I was the IT generalist at a travel agency, then worked Service Desk at Kazpost, heading for a sysadmin career. A course along the way showed me I cared far more about the visual side of the web — so I moved into frontend.
Today I work in Vue 3 / Nuxt and React / TypeScript: migrating legacy codebases to scalable architectures (Feature-Sliced Design, SSR), building company-wide design systems, and wiring the process around data — A/B tests, error monitoring and E2E tests in CI.
I like owning frontend architecture end to end rather than a single screen, and growing the team around it.
I love frontend because it never stops throwing new surprises and challenges at you.
In the press
Experience
ZimranEdTech
Remote
Web Team Lead
· 6 mo
- Owned frontend architecture for the EdTech web platform while shipping production code daily as a hands-on lead.
- Led a cross-functional team of 4 engineers (frontend and backend): code review, 1:1s, performance reviews and growth plans.
- Defined the technical hiring bar and ran the interview loop for frontend candidates.
- Standardized team conventions as shared Claude Code Skills and instruction files, so AI-assisted code matched project architecture and review standards.
Senior Frontend Developer
· 1 yr 5 mo
- Led the migration of a 433K-line mixed-paradigm React codebase to strict Feature-Sliced Design on Vite, choosing a widely adopted standard so new engineers could navigate and extend it with minimal ramp-up.
- Built a Node.js + OpenAI API localization tool for 13 languages, cutting per-task translation time from 30 minutes to 2.
- Selected Statsig over GrowthBook and integrated it as the experimentation platform, enabling 100+ A/B tests on upsell flows, with Amplitude dashboards validating data integrity.
- Covered business-critical flows with Playwright E2E tests gating every release in CI — blocking 2 releases that would have broken the revenue-critical upsell flow.
- Migrated error monitoring from Bugsnag to Sentry, speeding up detection of regressions in core features.
Kolesa Group (opens in a new tab)Krisha.kz
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Senior Frontend Developer
· 2 yr 2 mo
- Co-led the migration of Krisha.kz core modules (~1.5M MAU) from a PHP/jQuery monolith to Vue 3 / Nuxt 3 SSR, building the reference implementation other engineers followed.
- Built the company-wide Vue + Storybook UI library from the Figma design system — still the single source of truth for Krisha.kz and Kolesa.kz.
- Cut new-developer onboarding from 2 days to ~10 minutes with a bash automation suite covering Docker, Nginx and LDAP.
- Sole developer on the digital real-estate contract-signing webview embedded in the iOS and Android apps — a project that helped Kolesa become the first product company in Kazakhstan to operate an accredited Certificate Authority.
- Recognized as “Top Frontend 2023”.
Middle Frontend Developer
· 3 yr 2 mo
- Built CRM.krisha.kz as a Vue.js SPA for lead management, agent tooling and call handling.
- Implemented real-time autodialing over WebSockets (Centrifugo), helping call-center operators process leads faster and turn incomplete leads into structured records.
- Delivered the New Flats, Lead Generation and Krisha Agents interfaces, validating multi-step flows through A/B testing.
- Migrated builds from Webpack 4 to 5, introduced Vite where appropriate, and set up GitHub Actions CI/CD with Dockerized dev environments.
Alexandrov.co
Almaty, Kazakhstan
Frontend Developer
· 1 yr 11 mo
- Erinfo: built the camera flow and face recognition in React Native on top of Amazon Rekognition — in an emergency the app identified a patient and returned their medical data to first responders.
- Restaff: shipped a cross-platform Electron desktop app for time tracking on Windows and macOS.
- Delivered commercial projects in Vue, React and React Native for international Upwork clients, working asynchronously across time zones.
- Set up Storybook for component development, speeding up the design-to-development handoff.
Before frontend
System administration and support — where the path into IT started
Lead Service Desk Specialist Kazpost
User support, ticket triage and access management for the internal banking and postal systems.
System Administrator Kizmet Sayahat
The local network and hardware fleet, the company website, CCTV and IP telephony at a travel agency.
Projects
SplitCheck Bot
2026
A Telegram bot that reads a photo of a receipt and splits the bill across the group.
Recognizes line items with Claude Vision and splits the bill either evenly or item-by-item, with shared items and a proportional service charge. Tracks who has already paid, and /debtors nudges everyone still owing across every receipt in the chat.
Impact: A personal project taken from idea to automated Fly.io deploys via GitHub Actions.
Krisha.kz on Vue 3 / Nuxt 3 SSR
2022 — 2024
Moving the core of a real-estate marketplace from PHP/jQuery to a modern SSR stack.
Co-led the migration of the core modules of Krisha.kz — Kazakhstan’s largest real-estate marketplace — from a monolith to Vue 3 / Nuxt 3 with server-side rendering, and wrote the reference implementation the rest of the sections followed.
Impact: ~1.5M monthly active users.
Kolesa Group UI library
2022 — 2024
A Vue + Storybook design system shared by two of the company’s products.
Built the company-wide component library from the Figma design system and took it to the point where both product teams pull components from it instead of writing their own.
Impact: Still the single source of truth for Krisha.kz and Kolesa.kz.
Internal company project — source code is private
Migrating 433K lines to Feature-Sliced Design
2024 — 2026
Bringing a large React codebase under one comprehensible architecture.
A 433K-line mixed-paradigm codebase moved to strict Feature-Sliced Design on Vite. The standard was chosen deliberately: it is documented and widely known, so a new engineer can navigate the project almost immediately.
Impact: Onboarding no longer depends on who happens to explain the project.
Internal company project — source code is private
A localization tool for 13 languages
2025
Node.js + OpenAI API instead of translating interface strings by hand.
An internal CLI that translates interface strings into 13 languages at once and writes them back into the project’s locale files, preserving the key structure.
Impact: Per-task translation time: 30 minutes → 2 minutes.
Internal company project — source code is private
Digital real-estate contract signing
2023
A contract-signing webview embedded in the iOS and Android apps.
Sole developer on the project: a real-estate deal-signing interface inside the mobile apps, built against the requirements for a legally meaningful signature.
Impact: Helped Kolesa become the first product company in Kazakhstan to operate an accredited Certificate Authority.
Internal company project — source code is private
Skills
Frontend
Architecture
Testing & quality
Tooling & infrastructure
Product & data
AI tooling
Education & languages
Education
Master’s degree — Information Systems
Almaty University of Power Engineering and Telecommunications
Bachelor’s degree — Information Systems
Almaty University of Power Engineering and Telecommunications
Bachelor’s degree — Economics and Management in Energy and Industry
Moscow Power Engineering Institute (NRU MPEI)
Languages
- RussianNative
- KazakhNative
- EnglishProfessional working
Contact
Open to new opportunities — and to a good conversation about frontend. Email me or reach out on LinkedIn; I usually reply the same day.
Almaty, Kazakhstan · Open to opportunities · Remote