Software Engineer · TypeScript · Sofia, Bulgaria 🇧🇬
I build full-stack systems in TypeScript and Java, and I've been doing it professionally since 2023 — jBoxers, Latona, HedgeServ, and client work after that.
Most of what I care about sits in the seams: how services talk without losing messages, what happens on the retry, and how you diagnose a Node process that got OOM-killed with no stack trace. When a project needs an Angular or React frontend, I write those too.
Resilience in production. At Latona I owned the failure path for an invoice pipeline handling 10K+ documents a day at 99.8% reliability — exponential backoff, a cron retry queue, circuit breaker, dead letter queue — then replaced 700+ one-off validation rules with an annotation-based engine. I later extracted Circuit Breaker and Retry into Resilience-Kit, a small C# library I wrote to understand the internals rather than just call a package.
Distributed real-time systems. My TU-Sofia thesis is a 7-microservice chat platform — NestJS, Kafka with per-channel partition ordering, Redis Pub/Sub fan-out, WebSockets, and atomic Lua scripts for multi-device presence. The interesting problems were the ones tutorials skip: user-disconnect races, idempotent writes, and an API gateway with circuit breaker and bulkhead isolation.
Production debugging. At HedgeServ I shipped heap snapshots for OOM-killed Node pods — PVC + S3 across 5 Kubernetes environments — so post-crash memory diagnosis took minutes instead of guesswork, and an atomic Mongo cascade delete across 10K+ dashboards so navigation, groups, and viz overrides couldn't drift out of sync.
AI in practice. I orchestrate coding agents day to day — taking Jira tickets through to implementation, then reviewing the diffs with the same tooling. Agents against real tickets and code review, not prompts in a chat window.
On a client contract building HRise, a custom HR platform (NestJS, PostgreSQL, React). In parallel I'm going further into system design and AI engineering — the decisions that come before the code, and systems built on top of foundation-model APIs.
BSc, Computer and Software Engineering — Technical University of Sofia (graduated June 2026)
Software Engineering — SoftUni (2021–2023)
Happy to talk about distributed systems, resilience, and full-stack architecture.
stiliyan.nikolov02@gmail.com
