Nikolay Nikolaev
Software Engineering Manager, Isovalent At Cisco
Sofia, Sofia-City, Bulgaria
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikolay Nikolaev is a seasoned software engineering manager with 14 years of experience leading cloud-native networking teams and shipping production-grade infrastructure for telco and public cloud environments. Currently at Isovalent (part of Cisco), he manages multiple teams working on Cilium integrations, CI/CD automation and advanced networking like BGP and SRv6, bridging deep engineering with customer-facing telco requirements. A hands-on leader with roots in low-level systems and NFV, he has driven high-performance networking work at Virtual Open Systems and led open-source networking efforts at VMware, Kong and Juniper. Nikolay is an active contributor to major CNCF projects such as Cilium and Kuma—improving control-plane UX, deployment tooling and cross-architecture support—which reflects his focus on operability and portability. Based in Sofia, he combines long-form systems expertise (from assembly to Go and Python) with practical team-building skills, and prides himself on making complex cloud-native networking “just work” for operators.
14 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (MSc) Computer Software Engineering, Master of Science (MSc) Computer Software Engineering at University of RuseComputer Software Engineering, Computer Software Engineering at UKTC
Bulgarian, English, Russian
Stackoverflow
1reputation
470reached
1answer
1question
Github Skills (34)
kubernetes10
ebpf10
networking10
cicd10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
devops10
dockers9
docker9
yaml9
bgp8
cni8
env8
convoy8
envoyproxy8
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
kumahq/kuma
May 2020 - Jul 2021
🐻 The multi-zone service mesh for containers, Kubernetes and VMs. Built with Envoy. CNCF Sandbox Project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 release, 510 reviews, 286 commits in 1 year 2 months
Contributions summary:Nikolay contributed to the Kuma project by implementing configuration changes to the control plane and improving deployment methods. These changes involved modifying configuration files, updating Kubernetes versions, and refactoring build scripts. They also implemented features that improved the user experience of the Kuma control plane, focusing on ease of use in Kubernetes environments.
kumacontourconnectivityvmssandbox
cilium/cilium
Jan 2023 - Dec 2024
eBPF-based Networking, Security, and Observability
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:22 reviews, 7 PRs, 22 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Nikolay contributed to the Cilium project by implementing bug fixes, improving code style, and refactoring existing code. They addressed issues related to identity sorting and duplicate package imports. Additionally, the user updated the project's dependencies and configuration, including replacing gopsutil with go-osstat for memory and load information, and enabling network-perf for arm64. These contributions demonstrate a focus on improving code quality, optimizing system performance, and ensuring compatibility.
bpfcontainerskerneltroubleshootingkubernetes-networking
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