Emil Koutanov
About Emil Koutanov
I'm passionate about the design and delivery of performant and scalable software systems. In my last 18 years in the industry, I have pursued elegant, sustainable, and cost-effective solutions that add long-term value. My current role sees me overseeing Architecture and Technology Strategy at Kindred Group, providing guidance and coaching across several engineering teams and a broad spectrum of technologies that underpin the world's leading online wagering experience. The role is part-coaching, part-design, part-strategy — ensuring the alignment of the architecture strategy to the broader goals of the business. In a previous role, I looked after Solution Architecture at William Hill Australia (subsequently acquired by BetEasy/CrownBet, then Sportsbet), focusing on architecture strategy, product development streams as well as engineering/IT transformation programmes. WH was a challenging environment with an extensive legacy code base and stringent performance, availability and regulatory constraints. I assisted WH in transitioning large parts of their technology platform to a microservices architecture and migration of mission-critical applications to AWS. Before William Hill, I held the role of a Platform Architect for the Digital Products competency of NBN, responsible for the architecture of mobile products and underlying APIs that support the deployment of the broadband network. Prior to NBN I was the Chief Technical Architect for Tote-X – a B2B gaming and wagering services provider. We designed a bespoke integration hub to route 80,000 bets/sec from high volume professional bettors around the world to target markets in Asia. I'm an avid open-source contributor: I maintain Kafdrop — a web-based UI for Apache Kafka with 10M+ Docker pulls to date. (More projects are on https://github.com/obsidiandynamics.) I also contribute to various technical publications, mostly on the subject of distributed and event-driven applications. I'm the author of the book "Effective Kafka" and several journal articles published in IEEE. I have an entrepreneurial and visionary character, having founded and sold businesses, raised capital, engaged in B2B sales, making me highly attuned towards roles involving high levels of energy, dynamism and teamwork. My knowledge and experience, my track record, as well as my ability to lead and coach technical teams places me in a unique position to deliver outstanding results for any organisation.