Senior backend engineer building high-scale, reliable distributed systems and machine learning pipelines for consumer and financial products. Led teams up to 15 engineers, shipped multi-tenant production systems processing 300K+ TPS with exactly-once/eventually-consistent guarantees and developed multi-model ML architectures at scale. Strong in incident reduction, payments/platform reliability, legacy systems, Kubernetes-based infrastructure and cryptographic protocol engineering (blockchain/DLT, Zero-Knowledge Proofs). Open-source contributor (IETF TLS/DTLS 1.3; PSF; zkLocus) with published work spanning security, law, and financial markets. I hold a BSc in Computer and Software Engineering; MSc in Software Engineering and Distributed Systems; in progress MSc in Law and Financial Markets.

Skills / Focus Areas

  • Distributed systems: event processing, consistency/exactly-once, concurrency, multi-tenant, reliability/observability, consensus protocols, blockchain/DLT, Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • Backend: API design, payments/platform systems, security, performance
  • Infra: Kubernetes, Kafka/RabbitMQ, MySQL/PostgreSQL/Redis, NoSQL
  • Languages: Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, C#, Solidity, Rust

💻 Professional Experience

Consulting & Contracting

Senior Software Engineer & Distributed Systems Architect
2019 – Present
  • Leadership: Led teams of up to 15 engineers across multiple projects; took ownership's of the team's code; set technical direction, execution plans, and delivery standards.
  • Large-Scale Distributed Systems: Architected, implemented and deployed a quasi-real-time, exactly-once, eventually-consistent processing platform handling 300K+ TPS (multi-tenant, multi-region, multi-cloud).
  • User-facing Platforms: Built and maintained high-throughput platforms serving over 10 million users per day for real-time social user interactions, payments, live video streaming, legal compliance using Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, NodeJS, Django, FastAPI, React, Next.js, Svelte, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka, MongoDB, DuckDB, Kubernetes.
  • Machine Learning & Data Engineering: Architected and implemented ML models, pipelines, and agentic workflows for video/image similarity search used at scale.
  • Payment Systems: Refactored user-facing payment system integrations to improve traceability, security, performance and enforce failure-resistant exactly-once semanthics; resolved double-charge, chargeback, failure and reconciliation issues.
  • Infrastructure & Operations: Debugged, optimized, and operated high-traffic services in concurrent environments; led Kubernetes-based infrastructure improvements to improve performance, reliability and eliminate recurring outages.
  • Legacy Systems: Reverse-engineered and maintained 30+ year old systems to enable fixes, feature work, and rewrites across C, C++, Java, C#, VB .NET, and Python ecosystems; modernized legacy systems in an iterative approach, with multi-tenant logic coordination during the process.
  • Technical Interviewing: Conducted technical interviews for backend, frontend, and full-stack roles (screening + deep-dive practical), primarily across Python and TypeScript/JavaScript stacks (Django/FastAPI, React/Next.js), both as a tech lead and as an independent interviewer.
Roles: Backend, Full Stack, Frontend, Tech Lead, DevOps, CTO
Recent Tech: Python, Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Solidity, Rust, Perl; Django, FastAPI, React, Next.js; PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Kafka, MongoDB, DuckDB; Kubernetes

Corporate Financial Management

Financial Engineer & Portfolio Manager
2025 -
  • Owned financial operations of a leveraged real-estate investment vehicle, including investment risk evaluaton, cashflow management and financing workflows
  • Managed corporate portfolio on both, a discretionary and quantitative basis
  • Architected, implemented and deployed machine-learning pipelines for automated trading and entry price discovery, covering feature engineering, model selection, training, backtesting, and parameter optimization
  • Provided legal guidance and compliance in financial markets

Mina Foundation

Senior Full Stack Engineer & Technical Expert
2024 - 2025
  • Served on the board as a technical expert in Zero-Knowledge Proofs, O1JS and Mina Protocol for evaluating projects proposed for the ecosystem's funding
  • Developed Discord bot for on-chain treasury allocations, governance and voting using Python and AstroJS
  • Developed real-time web application for on-chain treasury allocations, governance and voting using Next.js, React, Rust and Pyhton
  • Lead multiple engineers
  • Analyzed and reviewed tokenomics and proposals

zkLocus - Private Geolocation Sharing with ZK-SNARKs

Founder
2024 -
  • Architected recursive zkSNARK protocol for authenticated geolocation verification
  • Implemented the protocol in O1JS. Kimchi (PLONK-based) zk-SNARK proofs recursively wrapped with Pickles
  • Implemented smart contracts using the base circuits for Mina Blockchain
  • Released as a whitepapaer alongside client-side proving, web app integration & deployed smart contracts
  • Proposed and accepted via Mina Foundation

Python Software Foundation (PSF)

Contributing Member
2018 -
  • Developed and maintained numerous open-source software available to public at no charge
  • Lead multiple workshops, training sessions and talks in corporate and open settings

Mercedes-Benz IO

Software Engineer
2018 - 2020
  • Took on backend software engineer and DevOps roles
  • Developed internal software tools for analytics, tracking and management
  • Migrated external user-facing systems to in-house kubernetes cluster
  • Developed and co-architected message-sending systems for real-time communication between software components

Freelance & Contracting

Full Stack Software Engineer
2014 – 2018
  • E-commerce platform for online food delivery (UberEats-like) — Django, PostgreSQL, Redis. Built core marketplace functionality (catalog, ordering workflow, admin/back-office features) and production-ready infrastructure. Source code ↗
  • Custom content management systems & internal tools — PHP, Django. Developed tailored CMS solutions and operational tooling to support content workflows and business processes.
  • Web automation, data extraction & discovery tooling — Python (automation/scraping). Implemented automation pipelines and data scraping tools, including autonomous web discovery/navigation networks.
  • Legacy system maintenance (project-based) — C, C++, Java, C#, VB .NET, Python. Maintained and extended existing systems: bug fixes, new feature delivery, refactoring, and performance improvements across diverse stacks.

🎓 Education & Academia

BSc Computer Science and Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon 2016

MSc Software Engineering and Distributed Systems, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon 2019

MSc Law and Financial Markets, Finishing in 2026

  • Thesis (in progress): Tokenised ELTIF 2.0: Designing a Compliant On-Chain Register and Transfer-Matching System (Ethereum) under the EU ELTIF RTS

⭐️ Projects & Contributions

Transport Layer Security (TLS) Version 1.3 ↗
Contributor to the IETF TLS 1.3 RFC 8446 specification. Also contributed to DTLS 1.3
CVE-2018-1000520 ↗
Discovered vulnerability in ARM mbedTLS
zkSafeZones • zklocus.dev/zkSafeZones ↗
Blockchain + ZKP for authenticated, private geolocation sharing for civilian protection in conflict zones.
GitHub Portfolio • github.com/iluxonchik ↗
I contribute and maintain numerous open-source projects, totaling over 100 projects in over 20 programming languages

🏆 Awards & Certifications

Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (ZKML) Bootcamp graduate (Encode)
Completed in Q1 2024
Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Bootcamp graduate (Encode)
Completed in Q4 2023
Mercedes-Benz IO SINFO Backend Challenge Winner
Programming Competition Champion, Lisbon 2018
Cryptanalysis of Ubiquitous Computing Systems
Training School Certification, Ponta Delgada 2018

📝 Articles & Publications

Illya's Threads • illya.sh/threads ↗
Articles on topics in finance, blockchain, AI, law, Web3 and engineering
Illya's Thoughts • illya.sh/thoughts ↗
Microblogging on topics in finance, blockchain, AI, Web3 and engineering
Illya's Blog • illya.sh/blog ↗
Longer-form articles on topics in finance, blockchain, AI, Web3 and engineering
TLS For Internet of Things • illya.sh/tls-for-iot-msc-thesis ↗
Master thesis as a part of the MSc in Software Engineering and Distributed Systems at IST
Deposit Guarantee Scheme of Japan: DIA & DICJ ↗
Academic paper on the legal framework of the Deposit Guarantee Scheme of Japan