I try to figure out how things work.
As you may have already guessed from the title above, my name is indeed Iliyan. I'm born in Bulgaria in a city on the coast of the Black Sea - Varna.
I have started on my engineering journey back when I was a kid and had to constantly fix our family desktop computer from crashing on WindowsXP and Windows7, where the issue might be either hardware related - ROM failed, motherboard got fried because of the very hot summers we had at the late 2000s, or I installed a pirated game with additional content (aka malware). That repetition of breaking and fixing changed my way of thinking and approaching problems from there on.
Afterward I joined in a high school for operation of road transport. Yes, it's not computer related, but it's in the engineering field. I actually do consider myself more of an engineer than a computer scientist.
Time passed by and then after high school I was working at a grocery store and like every confused 18 years old, I was wondering what I was going to do with my life. Then after looking of all the local Varna universities, I then stopped at this one, called *Technical university of Varna*. I got curious by the technical specialtes - mainly at computer science and computer technologies and internet. After a bit of thinking, I randomly choose the second option. That was by far the best life changing choice I've made so far and at that time I couldn't have imagined how much this decision was going to change me for the better.
In there I didn't learn only about technology, I learnt about working with others, exchanging ideas with passionate people, engaging in debates with professors and assitants, and most importantly - becoming an adult. That's the point of an university, shaping you into a well-rounded individual, who can be integrated into the professional and social environments and being responsible for their actions. I concretely believe in that statement. I've heard so many pepole (co-students), that believe that the point of an university is to get a job, that person is either delusional or being a stubborn child, that doesn't want to look at the bigger picture.
In the third year of my bachelor's degree (2021) I was in an internship of a small local financial institution, that we developed legacy Windows 32bit for WindowsXP systems in Visual Objects community edition (also called CAVO). In the same year I landed my first actual IT job as a DevOps engineer as a consultant. The good thing about being a consultant is that you can see different companies (clients) with different architectures and ways-of-working in a very short amount of time, but the bad part is that you are not a permanent employee in these projects and you'll have to learn all of those tedious company's processes and in-house tools again for the next project. Believe me, in time you'll get very irritated by it.
After some time I've spend working there and becoming more familiar with the company, I started to dislike the the company culture and decided to go elsewhere. In May 2025, I found another job, which wasn't just a job, but a life change. I had to move out to live on the southern region of France, Côte d'Azur.
And the story continues...
Site reliability engineer
Mid 06-2026 - Present
My day to day responsibilities mainly revolve around the support of internal clients, in terms of maintaining their products in the cloud during day 2 phase (e.g. after the migration of their product from in-house to AWS).
In addition, what I've also provided as support is remidiating vulnerabilities, raised by Wiz. Depending of it's type (misconfiguration, container, tagging complience), I'm either actively resolving it or encouraging the clients to resolve them.
Lastly, tracking the costs (FinOps) of their accounts via Cloudability is also part of my responsability.
What I've achived during my time is as follows:
DevOps Engineer
Mid 05-2025 - 04-2026
My first project is a software company, that provides global distribution service to airline companies. These distributions of data products are in the area of the travel industry.
The team I was in is in the department of ticket reservation. The role I'm currently working is platform engineer and the objective is to maintain,
operate and develop the data processing pipeline, that is responsible for ingesting the raw data, sent by the global distribution system, process it through multiple layers and finally send it to the customer via various transfer protocols - FTP or S3.
What I've achieved during my experience there, includes:
DevOps Engineer
Mid 04-2023 - 05-2025
Junior 02-2022 - 04-2023
My initial project focused on the development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) for a multinational automotive company.
Within this project, my role was working as a DevOps Engineer on AWS cloud infrastructure management, where we were responsible for maintaining the entire cloud platform, including the deployment of customer products with the help of AWS ADF framework, AWS Account-Vending-Machine and AWS Control Tower custom REST API.
We were also responsible governing the cloud platform by using AWS Cloudformation Policy templates and all of the essential resources.
The automation these processes was achieved through the use of AWS CDK Infrastructure as Code (IaaC).
As part of my contributions to client services, I implemented the following solutions:
My second project revolved around delivering valuable insights to enhance the shopping experience for customers and establishing loyalty programs for a renowned Whole Foods store company.
I was positioned as Data Engineer on the Azure platform for ensuring data integrity and data validation on the Raw to Source to Prepared Layer. For data validation processes, we developed a Test Automation Framework built upon the pytest framework.
The data flow initiates as follows:
Software Engineer
Internship 07-2021 - 12-2021
The intership consisted of mainaiting a legacy banking system for Balkan clients.
The system was comprised of a desktop Windows XP compatible application, written in CAVO (Visual Objects) programming language.
Masters degree
Software engineering
10-2023 - 07-2025
Graduates of the Master's Program "Software Engineering" can work as applied and system programmers, web designers and developers, software technology consultants, internet applications and more.
GPA: 6.00
Bachelors degree
Computer and Internet technology
09-2019 - 07-2023
The Objects of the Professional Activity of the Engineer with the specialty "SIT" are the design, development and maintenance of software and internet systems and applications, expanding the field of application of computer systems and networks and information technologies, successful application of modern and continuously developing technologies for the internet and expansion, distributed and parallel processing, as artificial intelligence.
GPA: 6.00
Bulgarian
Proficiency
English
Proficiency
French
Proficiency
A1 German Language Certificate
Info Bulgaria
10.04.2025 - ∞
AWS Migration acceleration program
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
09.2024 - ∞
AWS Technical accelerated
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
09.2024 - ∞
Partner Training - Gen AI & LLM
Databricks
10.04.2024 - 09.09.2026
Azure Developer Associate
Microsoft
02.10.2023 - 03.10.2026
Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
Microsoft
02.10.2023 - 03.10.2026
Azure Data Engineer Associate
Microsoft
28.04.2022 - 28.04.2023
AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
29.07.2022 - 29.07.2025
NixOS config
06-2024 - Present
It contains hardware/software configurations for setting up my personal/work machines.
Phd portal system
08-2024 - 06-2025
The project develops an engineering solution for digitizing an information system for doctoral students and candidates in order to be used by higher education institutions, which would integrate into the systematic process for the management and management of the so -called "digital university".
Geo Android app
02-2024 - 06-2024
Information system, which allows users to inspect hazards and risks anywhere in the world.
ChatApp mobile app
08-2023 - 02-2024
Mobile application for real time messaging communication
Project management with OpenAI
02-2023 - 06-2023
A browser-based project management app, that is integrated with ChatGPT-3.5 for supporting the agile team to autogenerate tickets.