Emil Koutanov

Emil Koutanov Email and Phone Number

Computer Scientist, Software Architect, author of 'Effective Kafka' @ Kindred Group plc
Emil Koutanov's Location
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Australia
Emil Koutanov's Contact Details

Emil Koutanov work email

Emil Koutanov personal email

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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.

Emil Koutanov's Current Company Details
Kindred Group plc

Kindred Group Plc

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Computer Scientist, Software Architect, author of 'Effective Kafka'
Emil Koutanov Work Experience Details
  • Kindred Group Plc
    Platform Architect
    Kindred Group Plc Sep 2020 - Present
    Sliema, Malta, Mt
    Looking after Architecture and Technology Strategy for Kindred's suite of fixed odds wagering products.
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  • Obsidian Dynamics
    Head Of Technology And Projects
    Obsidian Dynamics Jun 2008 - Present
    Au
    Obsidian Dynamics provides bespoke software solutions in the fields of high availability and high performance computing, transaction processing, e/m-commerce, and general-purpose web and mobile development. Responsibilities: managing of the company's day-to-day operations, liaising with clients, architecture, designing and developing software, strategic decision making.Achievements:• Provided key architectural and managerial consultancy to major gaming and wagering vendors. Clients include Typhoon Gaming, Tote-X Australia, William Hill and BetEasy.• Built the first pari-mutuel totalisator betting engine optimised for use with the BitCoin blockchain. • Built high availability and high performance clustering solutions, purchased by clients in Australia and overseas.• Consulted in a senior technical role on a number of successful projects involving high volume transaction processing. • Developed a commercial schema evolution library (Continuum) for persistence of Java objects, XML and JSON – used primarily for custom persistence stacks and dealing with semi-structured, versioned data.• Built a crowdfunding platform in 2008, sold in 2010.• Numerous developments in the application of Radial Basis Function Networks to speaker authentication biometric security systems.• Novel applications of number factorisation for increasing the resolution of Fourier transforms (without using window functions) in digital signal processing.
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  • Optus
    Senior Solution Architect
    Optus Jul 2020 - Sep 2020
    Macquarie Park, Nsw, Au
    This role oversees architecture of the customer-facing systems within the Digital Hub. Responsibilities include —• Design of tactical and strategic systems to directly support online sales, with delivery horizons spanning from weeks to several years, and project budgets upwards of $25M.• Liaising with vendors and internal staff, providing guidance in the design and delivery of software solutions.• Setting the overall architecture direction and providing design/architecture coaching within Engineering.
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  • Mnf Group
    Architecture Practice Lead
    Mnf Group Nov 2018 - Jun 2020
    The Architecture Practice Lead role at MNF Group Limited sees me wearing several hats:1. Development of architecture strategy within Engineering: Ensuring that the systems we build and the methods we choose today help support the business in its future modes of operation, while catering to our present customers and maintaining MNF's industry-leading position.2. Design of strategic operational and business systems: The company has invested substantially into modernising their software systems as well as their voice and data networks, and a large part of my role involves the high-level design of these systems and the coordination of activities across multi-disciplinary Engineering teams.3. Coaching of engineering teams and providing design assistance: In a nutshell, my role is to ensure that the systems we design today continue to support the business for many years after they've been delivered. It's not something one can do as an individual; it requires the entire team to be upskilled, aligned, and operating collaboratively at their level best. The ability to provide technical leadership and grow the team is a crucial part of the role.
  • Beteasy
    Architect – Platform & B2B
    Beteasy Apr 2018 - Nov 2018
    Looking after the architecture practice of the Sydney BetEasy office, while transitioning the software assets of William Hill Australia following its acquisition. Part of this role involved planning the staged migration of data and customers across two technology stacks. These were quite dissimilar, which made it a challenge: having distinct feature sets and idiosyncratic approaches to modelling data and business processes. In addition, the two engineering teams had diverse skill sets, being at different points in their journey of modernising their application suite and migrating the workloads to AWS. Maintaining a cooperative culture across two previously competing organisations presented a unique challenge, requiring very close collaboration with both sets of teams, often acting as a mediator and a voice of reason. An experience I felt fortunate to have been a part of.The bulk of the architecture workload was focused on the design and development of a strategic B2B integration platform — largely a carry-over of the programme of work launched on the William Hill tech stack. The design of the platform was heavily based on asynchronous event streaming, eliminating polling and any forms of synchronous request-response style messaging patterns. The solution ensured that our integration partners had access to accurate and timely market data, were able to strike bets in high volumes, and received settlement information in real-time, within milliseconds of settlement events occurring in our systems. Maintainability and extensibility were key design goals from the outset, largely proven when the operation of the platform and BAU work streams were partly outsourced to an IT partner.
  • William Hill
    Lead Solution Architect
    William Hill Apr 2016 - Apr 2018
    London, England, Gb
    William Hill is one of Australia's leading bookmakers. Operating a zero-downtime, 24x7 business across a range of digital channels, with peak bet volumes in excess of 6,000/min on the Melbourne Cup, WH presents a compelling technical challenge.Being at the helm of Solution Architecture in WH, my key responsibilities were:• Transitioning WH from a legacy monolithic, database-centric platform to a contemporary service-oriented architecture, underpinned by loosely coupled, event-driven microservices to componentise the platform — leading to a more robust and maintainable system and promoting large-scale component/service reuse.• Establishing an architecture strategy and reference models for all future product and platform work; maintaining architecture principles and guidelines for use across Engineering — promoting standards and minimising one-off 'snowflake' solutions.• End-to-end solution design; working with a range of stakeholders to identify fit-for-purpose solutions that are aligned to the architecture strategy, helping William Hill to go from a challenger brand in 2015, to an industry benchmark in 2017.• Migrating the on-prem footprint (1,000+ VMs) from multiple data centres to AWS, containerising to increase deployment density — improving the platform's scalability and availability and adding to the overall business agility.• Providing ongoing design guidance and coaching to engineering teams; always being available and staying involved throughout the entirety of the SDLC.• Substantial B2B capability uplift, migrating from a legacy system to a solution capable of settling some 40,000 bets/sec. On Melbourne Cup, bet settlement with WH's largest corporate client completed in under a minute.I'd say my biggest achievement was an engineering mindset shift, ensuring that developers factor in architectural concerns, make prudent decisions and ultimately build more sustainable solutions. Without the latter, little of the above could have been achieved.
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  • Nbn Co Limited
    Solution Architect – Digital Products & Mobility
    Nbn Co Limited Sep 2014 - Apr 2016
    North Sydney, Nsw, Au
    The National Broadband Network is the largest infrastructure project undertaken in Australia, bringing broadband access to millions of households.NBN is a complex environment and as a Platform Architect my responsibilities were:• End-to-end solution architecture of Field Mobility projects, supporting network construction, service provisioning and assurance activities.• Platform component/integration architecture for the mobility product portfolio.• Design of highly available and scalable application services using Java EE and Spring.• Applying SOA and API-first to design of RESTful services, enabling 1000s of mobile clients to interact with NBN's OSS stacks.• Creation of architectural views (based on TOGAF, using UML, BPMN); alignment of solution architecture to broader EA strategy.• Design of security models to protect key national infrastructure plans; compliance with InfoSec architecture governance.• Leading agile delivery teams in a mixed (in-house and outsourced) environment; multiple vendor management.• Coaching of teams and individuals; helping people perform at the best of their ability.• Strategic roadmapping, thought leadership and forward-looking design of the platform to enable NBN to deploy new mobility products.• Resourcing the architecture practice, hiring solution architects and lead developers.Achievements:• Extended our app suite to allow field workers to visualise and interact with network inventory, supporting multiple access technologies, and allowing network assurance techs to perform diagnosis in the field.• Delivered on a $4M program for tracking construction faults, delivering defect notices to construction partners and managing remediation.• Shielded the team from a governance-heavy waterfall SDLC, while allowing for an agile Scrum delivery.• Created reference architecture and principles to standardise application design, accelerate on-boarding and help the team scale from 20 initially, to over 60 in 2015.
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  • Tote-X (Aust) Pty. Ltd.
    Chief Technical Architect
    Tote-X (Aust) Pty. Ltd. Jan 2014 - Aug 2014
    Tote-X provides wholesale level access to the world's betting markets for sophisticated/professional and high volume bettors.Responsibilities: managing of the company's technical department (6 developers and 4 testers), distributed across Australia and Europe, enterprise architecture and liaising with high net worth customers.Achievements:• Architected a high performance, highly resilient transactional API for routing wagers from customers' systems to target betting markets via ITSP (Inter-Tote Systems Protocol).• Achieved transactional throughput of 80,000 bets per second.• Live in March 2014; being the first to offer API-based access to the Hong Kong pari-mutuel pools. (Previously betting was exclusive to the HK domestic market.)• Agile solutions delivery, averaging of one new betting product per month fully built, tested, partner-certified and deployed (compared to one per quarter for the nearest competitor).• Architected a unique trading engine that enables bettors to exchange wagers in an in-play market.• Undertook risk assessment of the existing service offering, resulting in a successful project to enhance Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery aspects of the product.• Designed complex Discrete Event Simulations, utilising econometric models and Monte Carlo methods to model and predict punter behaviour in novel betting markets.
  • Maze Retail
    Ceo
    Maze Retail May 2012 - Jan 2014
    Maze Retail is a provider of web and mobile technology solutions for the retail industry.Responsibilities: software architecture and design, business development, strategic planning.Achievements:• The only platform combining rewards, vouchers and prepayments in one mobile solution. Fully customisable to the needs of the retail business. With data and services hosted on the cloud (SaaS) – accessible via portals and REST APIs.• Deployed mobile applications for both iOS and Android stacks, covering 94% of shoppers’ smartphones.• Integration with online payment processing, location services and social networks.• Live, with 12,000+ users across Australia.• Agile solutions delivery – from concept to MVP in under 6 months. Continuous feature delivery with 4 week production release increments.• Played a key role in Business Development, forging partnerships with a number of prominent industry players with a view to JVs and joint bids.• Developed business plans, built financial models and constructed Information Memorandums to raise capital.
  • Typhoon Gaming
    Chief Architect
    Typhoon Gaming Jul 2005 - Jul 2012
    Sydney, Au
    At Typhoon, I was the principal architect of one of the world's most sophisticated betting systems. With the backing of a "dream team" of engineers and testers, we achieved a number of "firsts" (including records that are still standing):• Record: Fastest totalisator betting engine - clocked at 11,500 TPS on a 50,000 IOPS SSD+RAID (hardware TCO under $50,000).• First: 24x7, cross-timezone and cross-currency betting system with no mandatory end-of-day cycle.• First: No limit to number of events, races and runners (affecting traditional betting systems).• First: Introduced script-based automated testing and continuous integration to a betting system, leading to a dramatic quality increase and reduction in testing costs (and employee burnout)Other notable achievements:• Spearheaded a major internal transformation project to overhaul the existing product line architecture and build methodology, enabling its use in a broader range of applications and, particularly, improving its ability to integrate into legacy environments.• Major company turnaround after inheriting reigns from previous management – lifted employee morale, improved efficiency and reduced cost through automation, Continuous Integration and various CASE tools.• Undertook large external transformation projects involving a phased migration from legacy betting systems to a newly-procured replacement. Identified major risks and built a comprehensive architectural roadmap for the transformation, achieving “buy in” from a diverse range of stakeholders.• Developed business cases for alternative betting markets, such as social gaming and bet trading in-play. • Technical pre-sales of new betting products and complementary products to the flagship betting platform. • Performed reviews of solution architectures for external project deliverables.• Managed mixed software developer and tester teams comprising up to 15 staff in an Agile environment. Negotiated and monitored individual KPIs.
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  • Just4Markets
    Software Engineer
    Just4Markets Jan 2003 - Jun 2003
    Role: Software development, database administration.• Integrated transactional systems with reporting and business intelligence• Built incremental XSLT-based schema transformation engine for migrating data between software versions• Developed the only (at the time) IDE for debugging (stepping, watching, etc.) XSL transforms

Emil Koutanov Skills

Software Development Integration Enterprise Architecture Business Strategy Strategy Marketing Strategy Management Software Project Management Business Architecture Agile Methodologies Solution Architecture Software Engineering Xml Enterprise Software Business Development Start Ups Mobile Applications Transaction Processing Architecture Java Enterprise Edition Project Management Business Intelligence Mobile Devices Biometrics Iphone Artificial Neural Networks Spring Saas Strategic Financial Planning Uml Soap System Architecture Crm Java Entrepreneurship Consulting Data Analytics B2b Marketing Strategy Retail Product Development Thought Leadership Lean Startup Architectures Strategic Planning

Emil Koutanov Education Details

  • University Of Technology Sydney
    University Of Technology Sydney
    Software Engineering
  • Ryde College
    Ryde College

Frequently Asked Questions about Emil Koutanov

What company does Emil Koutanov work for?

Emil Koutanov works for Kindred Group Plc

What is Emil Koutanov's role at the current company?

Emil Koutanov's current role is Computer Scientist, Software Architect, author of 'Effective Kafka'.

What is Emil Koutanov's email address?

Emil Koutanov's email address is em****@****oup.com

What schools did Emil Koutanov attend?

Emil Koutanov attended University Of Technology Sydney, Ryde College.

What are some of Emil Koutanov's interests?

Emil Koutanov has interest in Enterprise Architecture, Sales And Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Building Businesses, Marketing, Uts, Software, Retail, Cars (Subies Mainly).

What skills is Emil Koutanov known for?

Emil Koutanov has skills like Software Development, Integration, Enterprise Architecture, Business Strategy, Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Management, Software Project Management, Business Architecture, Agile Methodologies, Solution Architecture, Software Engineering.

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