Daniel Papukchiev

Senior software engineer with ~10 years of experience building and operating marketplace, matching, and decision engines under real-world constraints. I currently work at Zenjob, where I’ve spent several years designing and running mission-critical systems at scale — including matching pipelines, staffing engines, ranking algorithms, and automation workflows that handle millions of events per day. My work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, data-driven experimentation, and product decision-making. I specialise in problems where supply and demand need to be balanced dynamically: fulfilment vs quality, speed vs correctness, automation vs control. I’m comfortable owning systems end to end — from system design and rollout strategy to observability, operations, and iterative optimisation. Technically, I work mostly on backend and data-heavy systems: event-driven architectures, Kafka, transactional workflows, PostgreSQL performance tuning, and data pipelines that make system behaviour observable and explainable. I care deeply about incremental delivery, reversibility, and using data to guide decisions rather than opinions. Earlier in my career, I worked on large-scale serverless systems at StudyPortals and led my first zero-downtime migrations while still at university — which set the foundation for how I approach system design today. I’ve spent most of my career working on marketplace systems, where real-world constraints, bursty traffic, and human behaviour directly shape system design.