At Car Rental Gateway, Vlad works as a Back-end Software Developer with front-end knowledge. He has been with the company for about a year and a half and has around 13 years of experience in software development.
His everyday work is often about improving system logic or fixing bugs in parts of the product that end users do not directly see. One example could be finding out why a customer sees the wrong package on a car booking website. Another could be improving a booking flow so rental desk agents can mark payments as taken locally.
These tasks may sound small from the outside, but they sit close to how the product works in real life. A change in backend logic can affect what customers see, how agents work, how data moves between services and how reliable the full flow feels.
Seeing how the pieces fit together
Vlad’s role is mainly backend-focused, but his front-end knowledge gives him a wider view of how features behave. He understands how an API response may later be used in the interface, how data should be structured for front-end developers and how backend choices can make a feature easier or harder to build.
“For me it is interesting to think through system working logic,” Vlad explains.
That sentence describes much of what motivates him technically. He enjoys the moment when an API endpoint receives the right request, the data reaches the code correctly and the result is written to the database as expected. For him, backend work is closely tied to logic, flow and cause and effect.
Front-end knowledge helps especially when designing API endpoints. As Vlad puts it, “It helps when designing objects returned in response and how they then can be used by the front-end.” It also helps communication. When backend and front-end developers discuss a problem, shared understanding saves time and reduces guesswork.
One task where this broader view helped was the addition of different configurations for agency setup. The work included both backend and front-end improvements. Understanding the full flow helped Vlad implement validators and place newly added data correctly into request arrays on the front-end side.
This is where his role becomes more interesting than a simple backend label suggests. His main responsibility may sit in backend logic, but his thinking follows the feature across the system.
Context before implementation
When Vlad works on a bug, he usually starts with logs and reproduction. First he checks what happened. Then he tries to reproduce the issue. If the expected behaviour is unclear, he asks how the functionality should work.
For new features and improvements, the starting point is context. “It starts with asking for context and reading documentation,” he notes. After that comes the design: what should be implemented, how it should work and only then the code itself.
This approach is one of the clearest signs of experience. After many years in software development, good work often starts with slowing down at the right moment. Jumping straight into implementation can feel productive, but it can also create the wrong solution faster.
At Car Rental Gateway, context matters because the system includes many connected flows: search, booking, payments, integrations, rental operations, APIs and other product areas. Vlad sees several reasons why such a system can be difficult to understand. Size is one reason. Older decisions can also affect the system in ways that are not obvious at first.
“The fact that we have a lot of microservices works in both ways,” Vlad points out. “It helps easier to understand how service itself works, but it adds difficulties for understanding how these services are related to each other.”
That is also why communication matters. Vlad sees good teamwork as a mix of clear communication, helping each other and asking questions when needed. Code reviews are part of that, because another developer may notice details or system behaviour that are easy to miss alone.
Sometimes even saying the problem out loud to another developer helps. The explanation itself can make the solution clearer.
Work that improves the system
The technical work Vlad enjoys most is adding new parts to an existing system. It can be newly built functionality or an improvement to something that already exists. These tasks are satisfying because they involve the full cycle: designing the logic, making a plan, implementing the change and testing the result.
One memorable CRG task was a security review and fixes for services. It involved dependency updates, broken versions and a lot of log checking. The work also gave him a stronger view on how to handle larger updates.
His takeaway was practical: “If you need to make updates safer, write automated tests at first and then update the system.”
Tests make the transition safer and help reveal what breaks when dependencies change. This kind of learning comes from real maintenance work. It is less about theory and more about understanding how systems behave when many parts move at once.
Vlad also sees positive challenges in bug work. A bug can force a developer to dig into the code and understand parts of the system more deeply. Newer services, especially Go services, also give him a way to improve his skills while solving real tasks.
Tools, judgement and AI
Vlad’s technical background includes TypeScript, PHP, JavaScript, Go, MySQL,and related web development technologies. At CRG, this range fits the environment well because different services and product areas can involve different tools.
His learning style is hands-on. “Learning by doing and checking examples are better working methods than only reading documentation,” he says.
He prefers examples, writing code and trying things in practice. Documentation helps, but understanding becomes stronger when he can test the idea himself.
The same practical view applies to AI. Vlad uses AI tools for explaining code, preparing implementation plans and sometimes writing code. He has also used AI to help write integration tests. At the same time, he keeps control over what gets implemented.
“I still do not allow AI to make work in auto mode,” he adds. In practice, that means he checks what the tool is trying to run or implement before trusting the result.
He sees AI becoming a normal part of development, similar to search engines and IDEs. The tools will improve, but developers will still need to check implementations, maintain systems and understand what they are asking AI to do.
Where variety meets practical engineering
For Vlad, Car Rental Gateway is interesting because it gives him variety inside one larger product. CRG as a whole is a big product, but it contains many services, flows and technical areas. That creates change without losing the deeper context of the domain.
He also values the technical environment. “A lot of stuff is automated and made easy for developers,” he says when describing the setup. Smooth tooling does not solve the task for you, but it removes unnecessary friction from everyday work.
The team is another important part. Vlad describes good software teamwork in simple terms: communicate well, help each other, ask questions and use reviews to share knowledge.
His advice to other developers follows the same line.
“You need to think about the whole system and look into the bigger picture,” he says. “It is always better to ask than not to ask and fail.”
The kind of developer who may enjoy this work
Vlad’s experience shows most clearly in what he pays attention to: useful work, clear logic, maintainable decisions and enough context to understand why something is being built in the first place.
That fits the kind of engineering work Car Rental Gateway does. A backend change can influence booking flows, integrations, data, interfaces and rental operations, so the challenge is often less about writing code quickly and more about making the right change in the right place.
The same environment is likely to suit developers who enjoy learning through real systems, moving between services and working with more than one programming language.
For Vlad, the motivation is simple: interesting tasks, useful challenges and room to keep growing as a developer.
