Evgeny Zhdanov
Senior Software Engineer | Technical Lead
Professional Summary
10 years in software engineering, last 2 as team lead. Built payment integrations at a gateway serving 10,000+ merchants. Took an HR platform from zero to production, then hired and led the team around it.
Currently founder and core maintainer of OpenTalon — an open source AI orchestration platform in Go, plus Talon, a logic programming language for expert systems. Safe LLM orchestration: multi-provider routing, prompt injection prevention, isolated gRPC plugins, MCP.
Core stack: Go, Ruby/Rails, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes. At my best when owning technical decisions and shipping with a small team.
Engineering philosophy: I don't trust theory disconnected from production. I work across the stack and pick up whatever the problem requires — language, protocol, or tool. I hire quiet engineers who deliver over charismatic ones who write reports. I build processes because processes breed discipline.
Employment History
Founder & Core Maintainer — OpenTalon (open source AI platform)
May 2025 — PresentProduct:
Open source AI orchestration platform in Go (Apache 2.0).
Key achievements:
- Founded and lead the platform — architecture, technical direction, public roadmap
- Built enterprise LLM orchestration — multi-provider routing (OpenAI / Anthropic / DeepSeek), prompt injection prevention, isolated gRPC plugins
- Co-author of Talon — a Prolog/Datalog-inspired language for expert systems; writing the compiler in Go
- Built opentalon-agents — persistent LLM-authored agents that run deterministically without a model at runtime
Software Consultant — Self-Employed
May 2025 — PresentProduct:
Contract development, technical consulting, and code review.
Key achievements:
- Part-time contract work on an online tablature editor (TypeScript, full-stack) — 6-month engagement, AI-assisted development
- Migrated legacy Ember.js app to React for a returning client — project originally built in 2016
- Led FB/IG widget system project — development, Helm/K8s deployment, GitLab CI/CD from scratch, mentored a junior developer
- Hardened CI/CD for Ruby projects (rubocop, brakeman, strong-migrations); upgraded Rails to 8.1
Team Lead — RocketWork
November 2023 — May 2025Product:
B2B HR automation platform for enterprise clients.
Key achievements:
- Took a stalled product to production as the only engineer, then built a team of 5
- Built engineering process from scratch — code review, CI/CD, weekly releases
- Hired 3 engineers — interviews, onboarding, day-to-day technical leadership
Senior Software Engineer — Emerchantpay
January 2021 — November 2023Product:
Payment gateway serving 10,000+ merchants.
Key achievements:
- Built Latin American bank integrations from scratch — transaction processing, payment forms
- Fixed security vulnerabilities found in production audits
- Mentored 3 junior developers through code reviews
Software Engineer — Noveo
June 2018 — January 2021Product:
Enterprise customer feedback platform for retail chains.
Key achievements:
- Cut dashboard load from 2 min to under 10 sec by migrating analytics engine
- Implemented enterprise SSO for corporate clients (SAML 2.0)
Junior Software Engineer — Magtuner SA (Lausanne, Switzerland)
March 2016 — May 2018Product:
Real-time educational engagement platform with live audience participation.
Key achievements:
- Built collaborative editing system in Elixir for concurrent user access
- Full-stack development — Ember.js frontend, Rails backend, document permission system