About
Hey, I’m Daniel Zagidullin.
I’m a Lead Engineer at Superads, a product by Superside. I build products, lead technical teams, and take responsibility from the first technical decision through delivery. I work at Staff / Principal depth in the code while assembling teams, managing delivery, and helping founders build their products. My design background shapes the interfaces; my engineering experience makes them work.
I can assemble the team, set the direction, and sit down to write the code.
At Superads, I work within a 12-person product team and collaborate across teams on frontend, backend, and AI development, reporting directly to the CTO. My work combines hands-on implementation with technical direction: evaluating approaches, helping colleagues develop their proposals, and making decisions that connect engineering with the needs of the product.
My work at Superside has included migrating more than 100,000 users between Amazon Cognito environments, rebuilding the authentication experience, and managing a two-month data migration and ETL process. At Superads, I’ve implemented the subscription system, developed data connectors and reporting features, and worked on AI agents and customer acquisition. I also maintain a system that synchronizes data from up to 6,500 advertising accounts across multiple platforms.
Before joining Superads, I worked on Superside’s customer acquisition experience: building CMS capabilities, reusable components, and landing pages, maintaining the corporate website, and improving our UI library. Some of that work became open-source contributions, including plugins for the Sanity community.
Through independent client work, I’ve also led multidisciplinary teams delivering products across media, education, recruitment, and entertainment. My responsibilities spanned understanding the client’s problem, shaping the solution, setting technical direction, and coordinating delivery. That experience includes leading a team of around 15 people, with up to 20 at peak, across multiple projects.
Together, we built a recruitment platform with a catalogue of 100,000 vacancies, a browser-based 3D car configurator used by 90,000 people, and a school broadcasting platform with Android applications, scheduling, and individual video programming for each school. Other work included internal HR software, interactive games such as Mematch and Community Hub Cup, and a service that transferred more than 15 million channel subscriptions between video platforms.
These projects taught me to connect decisions across the whole product: what users need, what the technology allows, what the team can maintain, and what the client is trying to achieve.
Making work easier for other people is a recurring theme in what I do. I’ve built macros, scripts, codemods, and plugins to remove repetitive tasks from my own workflow and my colleagues’ work. More recently, that has included AI-assisted development and agents. I’m interested in where these tools make a useful difference, how to evaluate their output, and how to incorporate them into a dependable engineering process.
That interest in building and sharing started early.
I grew up in Kazan, Tatarstan, in a family of artists. At 12, I was already writing Photoshop tutorials and taking on freelance work. In 2015, I designed and developed TatarTravel, an app for people visiting my city. I presented it to investors and government officials and secured grant funding to develop it further.
My early freelance work included projects for brands and nonprofit organizations, including a VK Mini App for WWF Russia’s 25th anniversary. At Immergity, I worked on browser-based WebGL interior design software and led graphic artists and engineers. My work also included an interactive 3D exhibition for Startup Village.
In 2020, I joined Winstrike as a full-stack developer, building Twitch extensions, websites, and software for gaming clubs — including a Fruttis cybersport poll and a HyperX PlayStation 5 competition. I later became a founding engineer at extensi.one, where our team created interactive games and experiences for brands including Microsoft, Nivea, HyperX, and a Twitch game for Palmolive Men. By 2021, our portfolio included 20 published Twitch extensions.
While studying business and management at Plekhanov University, I led the student council and created a course for beginner designers. My university work also included educational software, 15 academic papers, and five software registration certificates.
Today, I continue to build products of my own. Transcribe Video: To The Text and Feelix are two projects I’m actively developing. They give me room to explore ideas, make design decisions, and take responsibility for the complete experience.
I also share what I learn through talks, including “Playwright beyond testing.” Teaching has remained part of my work since those first Photoshop tutorials: finding something useful, understanding it, and helping someone else put it into practice.
You’ll find my events, design work, and public initiatives on Beyond work.
I welcome conversations about engineering roles, selected client projects, and speaking opportunities. If something here connects with what you’re building, let’s talk.