Boris Topalov
about me
I'm a full-stack software engineer currently based in Sofia, Bulgaria, with 2.5 years of professional experience. I most recently worked on B2B payments infrastructure at Capital One. Recently, I built Abby, an AI assistant for Ableton, and ToyDB, a distributed key-value database that uses the Raft consensus algorithm. Beyond coding, I spend most of my free time making electronic music. If you're interested in working with me, please reach out at [email protected].
work experience
- Automated a previously-manual payment refund process which reduced refund processing time from several days to under 15 minutes. Later rebuilt the codebase with a focus on concurrency, and PoC’ed a 4x faster implementation.
- Built a visualization tool for customer payment lifecycles, which is used by support agents servicing thousands of enterprise customers.
- Pitched and received approval for a Jira AI assistant after experiencing hours wasted on tickets. Recruited and led a team of 8 engineers and analysts, taught the team about AI agents, and demoed a working prototype for a hackathon.
- Rearchitected & rewrote a Java service in Go, and created extensive documentation to save developer hours.
- Owned, designed, developed, and shipped a cross-platform desktop audio plugin built in C++ (JUCE) and React.
- Built a pipeline in Python and AWS that used machine learning to extract musical stems for over 50,000 audio samples.
- Rearchitected core state management of a React codebase, resolving long-standing bugs and performance issues.
- Developed product strategy and pitch decks, created marketing material, and provided direct customer support for our applications on Discord.
- Built a fully autonomous GitHub crawler & scraper system which parsed thousands of GitHub pages and algorithmically ranked tens of thousands of GitHub users as candidates for recruiting.
- Created a custom priority-based job queuing system used by the system to prioritize scraping highly relevant data based on user-provided metrics.
- Improved the performance of core SQL scripts by ~70% through SQL profilers, and re-wrote large chunks of undocumented, inefficient code into well-documented and maintainable solutions.
- Created an automation-focused analytics framework which was used by teams covering $20B lending portfolios.
- Developed a monitoring and analytics dashboard that analyzed millions of data points every day to aid executive decision-making of a $7B lending business.
projects
abby
An LLM music production companion for Ableton that provides creative sparks and technical insights.
toydb
A fault-tolerant, strongly-consistent distributed key-value database implementing the Raft consensus algorithm.
locallm
Chat with an LLM agent that searches the web, cites its sources, and improves over time with long-term memory.
spotseek
Golang client for Soulseek, a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing protocol.
petri
A framework for orchestrating multi-agent experiments in a user-controlled experiment setting.
wordle-versus
Multiplayer Wordle!