Ivan Laktyunkin is a Principal Software Engineer at Confluent at Confluent. He possess expertise in c#, software development, multithreading, agile methodologies, software design and 35 more skills. Colleagues describe him as "It is quite impressive to me that Ivan assembled our DNS Recursive team. Under his leadership, the team surmounted sticky technical challenges and took responsibility for maintaining and upgrading old Microsoft code, adding new mission-critical services, and delivering on the high-availability and compliance requirements for our software. His blameless attitude during difficult situations reflects well on our growth-mindset culture at Microsoft and is helpful to get to the root-cause without putting anyone on the spot. This is complemented by his quest of integrating such learnings into our system design. Ivan's calm confidence while approaching issues with our services and customers is laudable, and he manages to create clarity during confusing situations. Ivan makes an effort to include every teammate in discussions and for our team to be inclusive. He enabled me to take advantage of learning opportunities external to our team even though it meant that my regular work would be paused. He encourages challenging the status quo with alternate solutions, and himself experiments with new ways of meeting our technical needs. Ivan has been an incredibly supportive and helpful manager to me, and I am grateful that I got to start my career remotely under him.", "Ivan was my first manager at Microsoft and I worked with him for around 1.5 years on the Azure DNS Recursive team. While working closely with Ivan, I realized that Ivan as a manager has a lot of great qualities and I would like to highlight some of those, 1. Calm under high pressure: In July 2020 when there was a global outage for the DNS Recursive service triggered by an external factor, our team was the center of the universe as almost most of the customers, Azure services were affected. Even though such a tense event, Ivan always maintained his cool and kept working throughout the mitigation and resolution of the issue. He drove the Severity 1 event and its postmortem so efficiently that other team members could continue their sprint work without any disturbance. 2. Fearlessness: Ivan is quite bold in taking projects which very few people would sign up for. It was Ivan's idea to eventually take over the ownership of complex WinDNS code from the Windows team so that team can make faster iterations of smaller fixes. For context, WinDNS is a 30 years old codebase that powers all the DNS recursive functionality which Microsoft provides to 1st and 3rd party customers. Ivan is the kind of person who will sign up for things first and will later figure out how to achieve it later. 3. Strong technical abilities: Ivan wrote 2 chrome extensions which made every engineer's life on the DNS org easier while doing operational work. Generally, the manager is expected to do more people management but Ivan's inquisitiveness and sincere willingness to make other people's life easier results in himself doing hands-on work. 4. Empathy: Ivan understood the situation I am in and greatly supported me during Covid-19 times. Due to Covid-19 international borders closures, I had to go on an unpaid visa leave from April 2020 to June 2020. During that 3 months period, even though I had no access to Microsoft property, I still had a regular 1:1 with Ivan every 2 weeks. There were no work-related discussions but to ensure that I am doing well. Afterward from July 2020 till Nov 2020 I had to work remotely from India due to the Presidential executive order but Ivan made sure all the meetings are shifted so that I don't need to work late in the night. There were just a lot of immigration headaches, nightmares along the way but Ivan supported me throughout.", and "I have been working with Ivan in Azure DNS Recursive team at Microsoft for almost two years. During that period he demonstrated strong leadership, technical and architectural skills, and great product vision. Under his management we successfully completed migration of Recursive DNS service from old manually managed platform to a fully managed VMSS based infrastructure and were able to increase the throughput several times, drove Azure DNS Recursive Resolver from Preview to GA, significantly improved telemetry and monitoring of the services we owned, as well as improved and redesigned a lot of components along the way."