Boris Topalov
software engineer & music producer
san francisco, usa
[email protected]
about me
Howdy, my name is Boris. I've been a software engineer for the last few years and am now exploring new projects. I'm also a music producer and am obsessed with electronic music. I was born in Phoenix, AZ, and grew up in the Washington DC area. I spent the last couple of years in Bulgaria, exploring my family's roots and getting a fresh perspective on life. There, I worked on distributed systems at Redis. I also helped organize and play at a few raves. I recently relocated to San Francisco to focus on tech and entrepreneurship. Always happy to meet people and swap ideas! Reach out at [email protected].
work experience
- Worked on the control plane for Redis Cluster (distributed Redis).
- Designed and shipped new auth mechanisms and control-plane APIs for enterprise customers, including major financial institutions, and improved performance and stability of existing features.
- Main point of contact for our biggest customer during a critical incident affecting hundreds of production clusters. Led the investigation and shipped a fix with minimal downtime while keeping the customer happy.
- Built devtools, CLIs, and agent skills for the team. Gave talks on agentic coding.
- Automated a manual payment refund process, cutting turnaround from several days to under 15 minutes. Later rebuilt the codebase on my own over weekends and prototyped a 4x faster version.
- Built a payment lifecycle visualization tool used by support agents servicing thousands of enterprise customers.
- Built an early Jira AI coding agent after watching hours get wasted on tickets. Recruited and led 8 engineers and analysts to build it, and taught people what LLM agents were before they blew up.
- Owned and shipped a cross-platform desktop audio plugin end to end (C++/JUCE and React).
- Built an ML pipeline (Python, AWS) that extracted stems from 50,000+ audio samples.
- Fixed long-standing playback and waveform rendering bugs in the web product.
- Also did product strategy, pitch decks, marketing, and customer support in our Discord.
- Built a fully autonomous GitHub crawler, with a custom priority job queue, that parsed thousands of pages and ranked tens of thousands of developers as recruiting candidates.
- Experienced, and enjoyed, scrappy startup culture.
- Sped up the SQL scripts our team's workflow depended on by ~70%.
- Built analytics dashboards for executive VPs running a $7B lending business.
- Built an automation-focused analytics framework used by teams covering $20B in lending portfolios.
- Got good at storytelling and speaking corporate.
projects
distributed systems
toydb
A fault-tolerant, strongly-consistent distributed key-value database implementing the Raft consensus algorithm.
spotseek
The only Golang client for Soulseek, a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing protocol.
database internals
cmudb
A fully functional toy SQL database management system written in Rust, built from scratch.
agentic software
palette
An LLM agent for Ableton Live, which aims to bridge the gap between a music producer's taste and technical ability.
languages + tools
Go · Python · Rust · TypeScript · React · PostgreSQL · Redis · AWS (Certified Solutions Architect)