Work

Crypto trading firm. Frontend Team Lead for a team of 5. Departed April 2026 as part of a company-wide restructuring affecting ~95% of staff.

• ▸Refactored a 30,000-line monolithic server.js into a worker-thread architecture, moving heavy KafkaJS order-book traffic off the main thread. Overturned the team's "Node just sucks" consensus by proving the bottleneck was design, not the runtime.
• ▸Built a client-facing OTC crypto trading platform on Next.js + React + TypeScript with real-time WebSocket-driven order book updates.
• ▸Built a parallel internal admin platform with API key management, reporting, and ops tooling.

• Next.js
• React
• TypeScript
• Node.js
• Worker Threads
• KafkaJS

Global crypto wealth platform. Engineering Manager for a frontend team of 5 within a chunked team structure, contributing to the Nexo web and mobile apps used by millions.

• ▸Designed and led development of a cross-platform component library shared between web and mobile (React + React Native), with full unit and e2e test coverage.
• ▸Made the React Native components renderable on the web via react-native-web, then auto-generated a Storybook so designers and engineers had one source of truth for every component — closing the design-engineering gap.
• ▸Managed the team end to end: hiring input, 1-on-1s, code review, technical mentorship, sprint planning.

• TypeScript
• React
• React Native
• react-native-web
• Storybook
• Jest
• Detox

Joined as Senior Frontend Developer; promoted to Software Architect with responsibility for tech-stack selection and architectural foundations across multiple client engagements. Led project teams of 5–10 engineers.

• ▸Real-time commodities exchange and market-data platform for a major US market-data and analytics company. Angular + WebSockets, high-frequency data streams.
• ▸Mobile companion app for an FDA-regulated implantable spinal neuromodulation device at a Fortune 500 medical-device company. Patients use the app to monitor and adjust their implant in real time.
• ▸Real-time sports-betting platform for a European betting operator. Angular + WebSockets.
• ▸Application-security platform for a US AppSec company. Built on Node.js, monkey-patches third-party libraries at runtime to detect vulnerabilities across a customer's codebase and UI.
• ▸Talks: Front-end Practice Overview · JS Stack & Hybrid (2018), Readable Code (2019), MentorMate Explains: Progressive Web Apps (2021).

• Angular
• React
• Node.js
• TypeScript
• WebSockets

Bulgarian web software company. Joined as backend dev but took the frontend layer too — was the most experienced person on the team for CSS and JS.

• ▸Built and maintained client web applications on the latest versions of Laravel and CodeIgniter.
• ▸Engineered relational data models that required deeply nested SQL JOINs — repeatedly hitting and working around MySQL's join limits via query optimization, denormalization, and careful index design.

• PHP
• Laravel
• CodeIgniter
• MySQL
• JavaScript

Designed and built a Windows desktop application (C#) that became the operational core of the business.

• ▸Drag-and-drop ingestion of Word and PDF source documents with automatic source/target language detection.
• ▸Machine translation with full source-document formatting preserved, automated project filing, word counting, and team notifications.
• ▸Company throughput rose from ~2,000 words/day to 20,000–40,000 words/day — a 10–20× productivity gain. Also formed the basis of my Bachelor's thesis on hybrid machine translation.

• C#
• .NET
• WPF
• Windows desktop

Varna-based web agency. Joined as an intern; promoted to Senior Full-Stack. The school of hard knocks for a generation of Bulgarian developers entering the field — and the foundation of everything shipped since.

• ▸Delivered custom web applications across a wide range of client industries on tight deadlines and constantly shifting scope.

• PHP
• MySQL
• JavaScript
• HTML
• CSS

Self-taught through high school and the early university years. First paid client at 16 — a website for a local real estate agency.

• ▸E-commerce site for a PC-hardware retailer and assorted gaming-community sites.

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• PHP
• MySQL

Design, build, and ongoing maintenance of the website for Pearl Skin, a leading aesthetic dermatology clinic in Varna. Live in production since 2014, multilingual (BG/EN/RU), with a custom CMS and reservation system. Currently undergoing a full modernization to Laravel 13 + React.

• PHP
• Laravel
• React
• MySQL