Dimcho Karakashev

Software Developer 3 - Platform Team

• Collaborated with senior developers and architects to develop both the front-end and back-end of an internal developer portal using React and Backstage for efficient cataloging of over 224 projects.
• Designed and implemented company-wide security processes for comprehensive Kubernetes and serverless secret management using AWS Secret Manager, significantly enhancing security by managing over 440 secrets.
• Established a process for secret scanning using TruffleHog to reduce secret leakage.
• Enhanced key user features of the internal developer portal integrating Redis and redesigned asynchronous behavior, reducing latency from over 5 seconds to 100 ms and improving user experience.
• Implemented a pubsub service using AWS CDK (Infrastructure as Code) and Python, capable of processing over 1000 requests per second while maintaining 99.999% up-time, and guiding the technological direction of the company.
• Published 3 Medium articles; most notable having 108 interactions and discussing insights on performance optimization of pubsub infrastructure, a critical piece in the Event-Driven Architecture.
• Onboarded 3 engineers on the Platform team and mentored an intern.

Software Developer 2

• Co-developed a tool for on-demand scaling of microservice infrastructure, achieving over 10% cost reduction.
• Developed multiple automated tools using Python to address company-wide technical debt, such as automated cleaning of 146 Feature Flags.
• Implemented automation tool for Datadog monitor creation and Datadog dashboard enhancement increasing the operational visibility and financial efficiency of services.
• Resolved over 12 issues related to our E2E Javascript performance test scripts and collaborated across over 4 cross-domain teams

Software Developer

• Collaborated on designing an object-oriented application for user authentication via smart card.
• Developed the security-related software of the application using C# capable of multiple factors of authentication to provide the option of balancing security and usability.
• Documented my contribution to facilitate the maintainability of the application.

Haptics Intern Engineer

• Gave weekly updates to the supervisor of the project and self-determined personal tasks and priorities to finish the project on schedule.
• Updated the firmware of a PCB to add Bluetooth capabilities for wireless interaction with the Oculus application and signals for a realistic tranquil Haptic experience.
• Presented a demo and plans of the project to a collaborating company and an investor to demonstrate accomplishments which led to additional meetings to discuss possible funding.
• Managed a colleague by delegating tasks and conducting weekly meetings.

Teaching Assistant(Programming Applications for Engineers)

• Lead a two-hour weekly lab of approximately 27 students.
• Evaluated labs and homework assignments in a timely manner.
• Provided adequate feedback to the students and explained concepts to improve students’ understanding.
• Collaborated with about 15 UTAs to solve any issues such as scheduling conflicts.

University of Waterloo

GPA: 88/100

Thesis: Secure Trading of Renewable Energy Certificates

• Designed a system to combine a secure resource-constrained device, Azure Sphere, with both permissioned blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, and permissionless one, Algorand.
• Implemented high-level APIs using Node.js and low-level applications using C to evaluate the proposed system.
• Conducted a comprehensive literature review on designing secure smart meters to serve as trusted oracles in the system.

Augmented Unlocking Technique for Smartphones

• Collaborated to develop a new technique for smartphone authentication based on pre-touch information simulated using UNITY engine.
• Collaborated to design an experiment comparing our technique to previous existing solutions.
• Discussed the analyzed data and based on preliminary results our technique is more secure with the cost of longer authentication times.

Hyperledger Fabric Benchmarking

• Investigated the throughput and latency of Hyperledger Fabric with transaction intervals sampled from Piosson distribution to determine the validity of previous studies.
• Developed a Python script to automatize the data collection and plotting.
• Gained a basic understanding of Docker and Docker swarm to explore the impact of different Hyperledger Fabric configurations.

Stenography - GUI Python

• Developed a GUI application using PySide in which a user chooses one big image and one small image and embeds the small image into the lower bits of the bigger one.
• Optimized performance of the initial implementation by a factor of 5 through making full use of NumPy. The project was in the top 10 fastest implementations out of 160 students.
• Implemented additional features such as dragging and dropping of images and different types of compression.

Smart Home System

• Designed a system, including simple circuits, to provide functionalities such as controlling a lamp through a Bluetooth module, interfacing with a temperature sensor, and others.
• Implemented all the C code for a 9S12 microcontroller to interface with the sensors and the Bluetooth module.

Club: Remotely Controlled Vehicles

• Gained knowledge about the process of developing a PCB (Buck Regulator).
• Learned how to solder PCB parts on a board and how to use a popular software for designing PCB called Eagle.
• Utilized version control in GitHub to collaborate with all the members of the Electrical Team in order to create parts for libraries, work on schematics, and board layouts.

Club: The Association for Computing Machinery (SigBots)

• Collaborated with members in the club to build robots for competitions and to have fun.
• Modified a proportional-integral-derivative controller of the robot in order to improve the movement of the robot.
• Learned C and interacted with different sensors such as potentiometer.