Summary
Michel Zinin is a pragmatic Senior Software Engineer with 18 years' experience building high-performance backend systems across domains from embedded automotive navigation to distributed web services. He has a track record of designing systems from scratch, modernizing legacy codebases, and leading small teams at companies like Booking.com, TomTom, Huawei and Mail.Ru, where he introduced practices such as mandatory code reviews and delivered significant performance wins (e.g., a routing server up to 10x faster). Deeply technical across C++, Go, Python and Java, he combines algorithmic expertise (PhD-level) with hands-on delivery in CI/CD and production operations. Michel is comfortable moving between research-proof-of-concept work and production-grade engineering, and he’s contributed to 20+ projects and 10+ scientific publications—an unusual blend of academic rigor and pragmatic shipping. Based in Amsterdam, he’s as likely to optimize routing algorithms for mobile devices as to streamline internal tooling that saves hours of manual work.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.) Applied mathematics and informatics, Master of Science (M.Sc.) Applied mathematics and informatics at Saratov State University named after N.G.Chernyshevsky
Lomonosov Moscow State University
Russian, English, Dutch