Elizaveta Shashkova is a Senior Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building developer tools, IDE features, and large-scale backend systems, currently working at JetBrains in Amsterdam. She has driven high-impact work on PyCharm and DataSpell—most notably a 20× Python debugger performance optimization and early Jupyter debugging support—and now focuses on AI-powered developer tooling such as RAG systems with embeddings-based search and incremental indexing for large codebases. A technical lead and mentor, she blends product-minded architecture with hands-on backend engineering to optimize performance, scalability, and developer experience. Her open-source contributions span debugger internals used by major tools (PyDev.Debugger) and test infrastructure improvements for pytest, reflecting deep expertise in debugging and testability that few tooling engineers combine.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Specialist Degree, Computer Software Engineering, Specialist Degree, Computer Software Engineering at Saint Petersburg State University
Sources for the debugger used in PyDev, PyCharm and VSCode Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:322 commits, 17 PRs, 31 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Elizaveta primarily contributed to the codebase by fixing bugs related to plugin management within the PyDev debugger, and they made adjustments to the stepping logic. The contributions also include work on exception handling. The changes show involvement with the debugger internals related to Django and Jinja2 template debugging, and focus on core debugging features.
The pytest framework makes it easy to write small tests, yet scales to support complex functional testing
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Contributions:1 PR, 8 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Elizaveta primarily contributed to enhancing the testing infrastructure and test coverage within the pytest framework. Their work involved adding new tests, rewriting existing tests using fixtures, and addressing issues related to the `parametrize` functionality, particularly the `indirect` parameter. The user's commits also include refactoring tests and updating documentation related to testing methodologies within the pytest framework, ensuring the framework's reliability and ease of use.
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Elizaveta Shashkova - Senior Software Engineer at JetBrains