Senior backend engineer with 12+ years in .NET. I design backend architectures, make slow systems fast, and automate away the friction in how teams build and ship software.

🟢 Open to part-time contract / freelance work — about 20 hours a week, remote (Sofia, CET). ivan@zdravkov.dev · LinkedIn · zdravkov.dev

Code is solved. Problems still aren't. I was a strong engineer before AI. Used well, it makes me a much stronger one. It takes the mechanical work off my plate so I can spend my time on understanding and solving the problem.

My current team works AI-first, with engineers and agents side by side across dozens of repositories. Day to day, that means I:

• Deliver whole epics solo. I've led new-functionality epics end to end on my own, in a fraction of the time they would usually take, plus a steady stream of stability optimizations.
• Run my work through agent workflows. Investigating tickets, tracing a change's impact, reviewing pull requests, testing, deploying and checking acceptance criteria.
• Automate my own day. I wrote skills that pull together my actionable items each morning and narrow them to the next right thing, so I work one problem at a time instead of drowning in the backlog.
• Start from evidence and verify outcomes. Reproduce first, trace the issue to its root, and call a change done only when it works in the real environment, not when the build passes.
• Keep the judgment. The agent recommends and explains. I decide.

• ivan-the-terminal: my self-hosted copilot. Claude Code skills that run my home server, retro game library, job search and daily health plan, each one built to replace a paid service. Deterministic work lives in tested scripts, skills stay short, and a multi-layer leak guard (git hooks, CI, a Claude hook) keeps personal data out of the public repo.
• Подай глобата: a free Claude skill for Bulgarian citizens. Photograph a wrongly parked car on your phone, and Claude reads the time, GPS and plate, finds the violations and the article of the law, routes the report to the right authority and drafts the formal email.
• free-water-tips: a PWA for finding free drinking water, with React Native Web, TypeScript Azure Functions, Cosmos DB and full CI/CD.

• Architecture. Re-architecting legacy systems into modular, service-oriented designs that a team can actually own. Clear boundaries, solid data models, documentation and onboarding that outlive the engagement.
• Performance. Finding the real bottleneck — usually data shape, queries or caching — and fixing it at the root.
• Workflows. CI/CD, test automation, dev environments and AI-assisted engineering, so a team ships more with less manual overhead.

• ~95% faster auth on every API call. Re-engineered a permissions system from 20M+ records to under 1M and added caching, taking authentication from 500–1000 ms to under 50 ms.
• 15+ minutes → under 30 seconds. Migrated an internal adidas tool from .NET Framework to .NET 6 with zero downtime, optimized its data parsing, and cut it from 3 servers to 1.
• 3+ hours → under 10 minutes. Cut VMware Horizon application synchronization time for an enterprise client, dramatically improving stability.
• Up to 5× faster configuration. Led the re-architecture of a legacy Maersk logistics platform into a modular system on Azure Kubernetes, with full data modelling, testing and documentation.
• 49/50 quality checks on first submission. Led a 6-month standardization proof of concept that became an organizational reference model for building cloud services.

Along the way: freelance lead engineer for clients in logistics, retail and fintech (Maersk, adidas, Dext); cloud automation tech lead and consultant at VMware by Broadcom; seven years growing from junior developer to technical lead on a healthcare and education platform.

"He is by far the best developer I have ever worked with. Ivan is highly skilled in designing and implementing web applications and always looks for opportunities to improve."

— Ravi Kumar, Senior Solutions Architect, adidas

"Ivan has a complete command of the entire technological stack and deep understanding of the trade offs necessary at various levels in order to achieve overall performance."

— Momchil Penev, CEO, SystemArts

"Ivan is highly skilled, meticulous, and easy to work with. He has great skills in translating business requirements to technical solutions…"

— Andreas Nissmark, Product Owner, Maersk

Read all recommendations on LinkedIn →

• Backend: C#, .NET, ASP.NET Core, SQL, REST APIs, service-oriented architecture
• Quality: performance tuning, unit & integration testing, test automation
• Cloud & delivery: Azure, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, infrastructure as code
• AI: Claude Code, agent skills & workflows, GitHub Copilot
• Also: TypeScript, React, Angular, Python, PowerShell, Bash

• MSc in Computer Engineering, Technical University of Sofia
• Postgraduate research exchange, The University of Tokyo
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• Microsoft MCSD & MCSA