Boris Topalov
software engineer & music producer
san francisco, usa
[email protected]
about me
I'm a software engineer who enjoys going deep on technical problems without losing sight of why they matter to the business. Most recently, I worked at Redis on the control plane for Redis Enterprise. I've built software ranging from audio plugins to LLM agents to distributed databases. I recently moved back to the US from Bulgaria and am exploring new roles. I'm looking to work on hard problems where software meets the physical world. I also produce electronic music, and since 2024 I've been building AI tools for producers. Reach out at [email protected].
work experience
- Feature lead for per-database TLS server certificate support on Redis Cloud — designed the platform's first paginated control plane API using RediSearch, benchmarked to be significantly more efficient than in-memory filtering.
- Led investigation into and mitigation of a critical misconfiguration in geo-distributed Redis clusters that put hundreds of production caches at risk. Acted as main point of contact for a major enterprise partner and shipped a remediation which fixed affected clusters with zero downtime or upgrades.
- Designed and shipped certificate-based client authentication for the Redis control plane, including support for multiple authentication backends (local database and LDAP) — deployed for enterprise customers at major global financial institutions.
- One of the first engineers on a large-scale Python-to-Go API migration; built a CLI comparison tool that validates response parity between legacy and new endpoints — used by the full team to surface bugs and inconsistencies across 200+ endpoints.
- 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 and deployed it to 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
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)