Boris Topalov
about me
I am a software engineer based in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I work at Redis Labs, on Redis's control plane infrastructure. I've had the opportunity to work on complex distributed systems, and to tackle the challenges that come with them. Outside of work and programming, I spend most of my free time producing electronic music, largely for the dancefloor 🪩. I love the open-ended experimentation that making music offers, especially because of the contrast it provides to the structured problem-solving of programming. I believe this balance made me a stronger engineer and teammate. If you're interested in chatting, don't hesitate to 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.
- 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.
- Among the first engineers on a Python-to-Go migration initiative, migrating API endpoints and achieving a ~10x latency improvement.
- Built a CLI comparison tool that validates response parity between legacy Python and new Go endpoints — used by the full team to surface bugs and inconsistencies across a 200+ endpoint migration.
- 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
palette
An LLM agent for Ableton Live, which aims to bridge the gap between a music producer's taste and technical ability (source code available upon request).
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.
auto-github-scaper
Smart, autonomous Github scraper using Puppeteer.
wordle-versus
Multiplayer Wordle.