Zahari Dichev
Software Engineer at Buoyant, Inc
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZahari Dichev is a software engineer with 13 years of experience building resilient, high-performance backend systems and service meshes, currently based in San Francisco and working at Buoyant. He has deep expertise in Rust and Scala, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like tokio and Linkerd—helping implement async debugging, TLS and cert rotation, exponential backoff, and core proxy improvements. His background spans low-latency trading systems, distributed storage and analytics, and architecting microservice messaging and search infrastructures, demonstrating a strong systems and performance orientation. Zahari regularly tackles tricky correctness and resource issues—memory leaks, gRPC error handling, and timer edge cases—while also improving developer ergonomics through API and tooling refinements. He pairs academic rigor (MSc Advanced Computer Science) with practical delivery across startups and finance, and his GitHub tagline hints at a quietly observant personality: "На Шипка всичко е спокойно..." (all is calm at Shipka).
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Pre MFE Certificate in C++ for Financial Engineering, Pre MFE Certificate in C++ for Financial Engineering at City University of New York-Baruch CollegeBachelor's degree, Computer Graphics, Bachelor's degree, Computer Graphics at SCADMaster of Science (MSc), Advanced Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc), Advanced Computer Science at University of St. Andrews
English, Bulgarian
Stackoverflow
391reputation
25kreached
3answers
12questions
Github Skills (51)
asynchronous10
debugging10
service-mesh10
debug10
kubernetes10
tls1210
futures10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
console10
async10
io10
tls1310
networking10
implement10
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
tokio-rs/console
May 2021 - Jan 2022
a debugger for async rust!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:48 reviews, 33 commits, 23 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Zahari primarily contributed to the `tokio-rs/console` repository by implementing features related to the console's core functionality. Their work involved enhancing the wire format, adding structured fields, and populating metadata. They also focused on improvements to the API, introducing functionality to reflect busy and idle times. Furthermore, they were responsible for refactoring the table view, enabling the addition of a resources UI.
crateconsolerusttokio-consoledebugger
linkerd/linkerd2
Oct 2019 - Nov 2021
Ultralight, security-first service mesh for Kubernetes. Main repo for Linkerd 2.x.
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 182 reviews, 103 commits in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Zahari primarily worked on implementing and supporting cert manager integration within the Linkerd2 project. Their contributions included adding flags, enabling dynamic certificate reloading, writing tests, and refactoring code related to the identity service. The user also addressed code review feedback, updated Dockerfiles, and made improvements to the identity service. Furthermore, they worked on setting up pre-install checks for secrets, integration testing for custom cluster domains and performed healthchecks.
golangmesh2-xrustsecurity
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