PLAMEN KOLEV

Software Engineer,
Booking.com

November 2018 - January 2020

Worked on the Landing Pages team as a Full-Stack developer for the biggest hotel booking company in the world. I was part of a large scale replatforming project that managed to increase the scalability, performance, accessibility and development speed of the platform. The work involved breaking a large monolithic Java application into small data-driver dockerized microservices. The technology used was Java SpringBoot for the API data layer, NodeJS and React for the presentation layer.

• Created and integrated a reusable front-end search box component that is currently used by Ryanair to book vehicles during the flight purchasing process.
• As part of the team, I was responsible for putting over a million landing pages onto the new platform, enabling over 10 000 customers per day to have an improved experience.
• Improved the platform’s reliability, alerting and monitoring by implementing Prometheus metrics and Jaeger Tracing into our solution. These metrics enabled us to create monitoring dashboards and alerted us during live issues, slow network traffic or outages.

Software Engineer,
The Hut Group

August 2017 - October 2018

At The Hut Group, I was responsible for developing a proprietary Warehouse Management Platform, responsible for shipping thousands of products every day from warehouses located around the world. The tech stack was Java 8 and SpringBoot event-driven microservices deployed on AWS that we managed.

• Provided 24-hour support as an on-call engineer and solved difficult problems during outages and live issues out of hours.
• Created an algorithm for optimising crane retrieval movements, which made it 20% cheaper and efficient to pull products from storage.
• Led an initiative to create a solution for warehouse simulations, which allowed the team to troubleshoot live issues as well as catch bugs in early stages during testing. The solution also helped us improve our defect age and decreased development cycle time.

Software Engineer Intern,
Intel Corporation

August 2015 - September 2016

Worked on high-performing, Cyber Security project at Intel Security. My responsibilities were to extend the in-house automation framework, which is responsible for ensuring that the Data Loss Prevention and Email threat detection engine cannot be exploited by attackers.

• Created new automation test suits as well as managed existing test scenarios using the Perl programming language.
• Used BASH scripting language and built-in Linux command-line tools to find and troubleshoot software bugs in the product.
• Delivered a UI automation framework using Perl and Selenium Web Driver. The tool was used by the testing engineers to create test suits, ensuring we do not introduce visual or functional regression for our customer-facing components. After the solution was completed, I created training sessions and taught the testing team how to use the tool.

BSc.(Honours) Computer Science,
Newcastle University

September 2013 - June 2017

Achieved First Class Honours degree in Computer Science with Industrial Placement.

Studied Software Design & Development, Database technologies, Computer Architecture, Computer Networks, Parallel Computing, Biocomputing, Machine Learning, and Software Modelling.

Songs of the World

August 2019 - September 2019

Created a web application that allows the user to experience thousands of unique music genres. It uses Youtube API, Python as the data engine and React for the front-end. Enjoy it here.

Web Platform for Digital Deployment of Virtual Servers

November 2016 - June 2017

Used my experience at Intel to create a platform for secure deployment, management and monitoring of virtual servers as part of BSc. final year dissertation.

The platform aimed to provide the same functionality as AWS’s EC2.
Technologies used: Puppet, BASH shell, Virtualbox, Vagrant, Ruby and Ruby On Rails.
The project is now open-source and can be viewed here

Neven Body Care

5 August - 28 August 2016

Created a PHP website for the Neven brand as part of a case study for creating web platforms. The project aimed to create an interactive system for featuring natural care products.

Secure Coding Presentation

5 May 2016

As part of Intel involved initiative, I volunteered to give a presentation to Lester College about writing secure code.
The talk was about how programmer bugs can introduce security threat vectors, and how to use best practices to mitigate exploits.

SpendWell,
Lloyds Banking Application

31 October 2014

As part of University team project, developed and designed a solution that aimed to help young adults budget better. The client was the British Bank Lloyds.

I was responsible for creating the web architecture, the back-end models as well as providing the authentication layer. The API was written in Python Django and the consumer was an Android application.

HackNE Hackathon,
Newcastle University

31 October 2014

Co-organized a hackathon in Newcastle University, United Kingdom.
The event was sponsored by Major League Hacking, the largest organisation for hackathons in Europe.

I created the promotional website for the event, as well as print materials, leaflets, flyers and posters.

Lights Automation,
PAConsulting

12 February 2014

Developed an environmentally friendly solution with the Raspberry Pi for the London based consultancy PAConsulting as part of a competition. Our design utilised hardware relays and sensors to control the lights of a building depending on the time of day and brightness.