Lenko Donchev
Principal Software Engineer (Independent) at Personal Projects
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLenko Donchev is a Senior Software Engineer with 13+ years building high-volume, fault-tolerant distributed systems across finance, cloud platforms, and security. He specializes in cloud-native infrastructure and backend development (Golang, Kubernetes), having architected and hardened platforms like Gravity, Teleport Cloud, JumpCloud, and Riverside Cloud Services while optimizing for cost and operability. His background includes mission-critical low-latency trading systems, petabyte-scale FX infrastructure, and real-time market feed handlers, as well as earlier work on game servers and machine-learning trading advisors. An active open-source contributor, Lenko has contributed to the Rust compiler and InfluxDB and improved the gravitational/gravity project’s cloud integrations and robustness. He combines deep systems programming experience (C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python) with practical security work—TPM, zero-knowledge protocols, eBPF and endpoint security—and builds experimental AI-driven agents and DeFi prototypes in his spare time. Based in Chicago, he brings a rare mix of production-grade cloud engineering, protocol-level contributions, and entrepreneurial prototyping.
13 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
MU "Panaiot Volov" Bulgaria
English, Bulgarian, Russian
Github Skills (12)
kubernetes10
deploying10
go10
cloud-services10
cloud-integration10
kubernetes-pods10
testing9
error-handling9
api8
apidoc8
cicd7
package7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
gravitational/gravity
Oct 2020 - Feb 2021
Kubernetes application deployments for restricted, regulated or remote environments.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:55 reviews, 9 commits, 22 PRs in 3 months
Contributions summary:Lenko contributed significantly to the `gravity` repository, focusing on enhancements to the status command and cloud provider integration. They added cloud-specific instance IDs and types to the output, updated certificate handling for macOS compatibility, and implemented network conflict validation. Their work also included modifying the web UI and enabling/disabling features based on manifest settings, demonstrating a strong understanding of the system's operational aspects. Additionally, they worked on code cleanup, test cases, and error handling to enhance the project's robustness.
devopsdockerregulatedrestrictedk8s
lenko-d/pine-tree-tax
Jul 2019 - Jan 2023
Contributions:40 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 7 months
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