Denys Smirnov
Staff Software Engineer at LiveKit
Tallinn, Harju maakond, Estonia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDenys Smirnov is a Staff Software Engineer based in Tallinn with 11 years of experience designing and shipping resilient backend systems and developer tooling. He has led architecture and data-pipeline work at Athenian, built language-agnostic code parsing infrastructure at source{d}, and now contributes to LiveKit’s WebRTC backend and SIP features. Denys is an active open-source contributor to notable Go projects—helping stabilize the Yaegi interpreter, extend Cayley graph DB, and improve protobuf sizing and font parsing in golang/image—demonstrating a knack for low-level correctness and cross-platform compatibility. He excels at turning tricky concurrency, parsing, and data-consistency problems into reliable production code, often addressing subtle edge cases (deadlocks, vendor detection on Windows, font table versions). Trained as an applied physicist, he brings rigorous problem decomposition and an engineering mindset to distributed systems and tooling.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Master’s Degree Engineering Physics/Applied Physics, Master’s Degree Engineering Physics/Applied Physics at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv
Russian, Ukrainian, English
Github Skills (27)
back-end-development10
api-design10
protocol-buffers10
testing10
interpreter10
graph-database10
data-structure10
sip10
go10
sips10
golang10
data-structures10
error-handling10
backend10
protobuffer10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
cayleygraph/cayley
Jan 2016 - Nov 2021
An open-source graph database
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 releases, 21 reviews, 502 commits in 5 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Denys made several contributions to the `cayleygraph/cayley` repository, focusing primarily on back-end development. They addressed issues with interface conversion and data handling within the `query/gremlin` and `graph/path` libraries by modifying code related to type checking and data structures. Furthermore, the user implemented new functionality within the `graph/path` library, specifically adding and testing `SaveOptional` and `HasReverse` functions to extend the library's capabilities and improved usability. The user also refactored code to change import paths for the `quad` and logging libraries, showing involvement in the core functionality of the database.
cayleylinked-datadatabasegraphgraph-database
livekit/livekit
Oct 2023 - Mar 2025
End-to-end stack for WebRTC. SFU media server and SDKs.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:15 reviews, 64 PRs, 65 pushes in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Denys primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the LiveKit project, focusing on the implementation and enhancement of the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) features. Their work involved developing SIP dispatch rules, authentication mechanisms, and protocol updates for outbound calls. They also implemented new API endpoints, including those for creating and managing SIP participants and trunks, as well as fixing issues related to trunk handling and participant management.
golangend-to-endsdkswebrtcvideo
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