Vladislav Afonin
Distributed Systems · Developer Infrastructure · AI Tooling
About
Software Engineer focused on distributed systems, developer infrastructure, application architecture, and AI tooling.
Experience spans platform engineering, backend systems, networking, CI/CD, distributed state, and developer-facing infrastructure. Strong emphasis on type safety, explicit system boundaries, predictable failure handling, and reducing operational complexity.
Technical work is typically driven by source-level research, RFCs, design documentation, profiling, and experimentation. Current work and research areas include decentralized computing, mesh networking, alternative transports, and LLM agent systems, with a focus on model routing, persistent sessions, provider abstraction, and OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Publishes technical notes and engineering articles on distributed systems, networking, infrastructure, and agent tooling in a Telegram channel.
Selected Engineering Problems
Keeping a shared platform consistent across 80+ applications
An internal FinTech platform had grown to more than 80 administrative applications across approximately ten environments and was used by over ten engineering teams. Shared concerns such as authentication, routing, runtime behavior, CI/CD, and deployment needed to remain consistent while individual applications continued to evolve independently.
Designed and evolved shared platform infrastructure, including runtime components, libraries, authentication, routing, deployment flows, and CI/CD, while preserving independent application development across teams.
Migrating 80+ applications from GraphQL to tRPC
The platform's GraphQL layer introduced schema compilation, duplicated validation, cumbersome handling of nested structures, additional parsing overhead, and a recurring risk of backward-incompatible API changes.
Initiated and led a migration from GraphQL to tRPC across approximately 80 applications and their BFF layer. The migration replaced separately compiled schemas and runtime contract validation with end-to-end TypeScript types and removed the need for custom scalars or loosely typed JSON structures for complex data.
The migration was completed in roughly one month, eliminated a recurring class of API compatibility failures, simplified development, reduced serialization and parsing overhead, and removed GraphQL documents from client bundles.
Separating chat state from the UI framework
Chat functionality had evolved into a tightly coupled collection of React hooks that combined networking, local state, synchronization, and UI concerns. This made behavior difficult to reason about and increasingly expensive to extend.
Initiated and designed a standalone Chat SDK with a framework-independent core and a local database as the source of client-side state. Implemented synchronization with the remote backend, offline behavior, optimistic updates, retries, reconnect recovery, pagination, and reply navigation.
The resulting architecture moved synchronization and transport concerns out of React and exposed a consistent local state model to the UI layer.
Launching an existing service in a new environment
An existing Help Center was embedded in the banking monolith and could not be released or tested independently. Launching it in a new Uzbekistan environment also required dealing with unfamiliar deployment infrastructure, multiple proxy layers, and the absence of a dedicated DevOps engineer within the team.
Extracted the Help Center into an independent service and handled the required CI/CD, deployment configuration, routing, integration, and release flows. The rollout was performed behind feature flags to avoid service disruption.
Independent deployment decoupled Help Center delivery from the main banking application and enabled separate testing and release cycles.
Commercial Experience
Yandex FinTech (2022-2026)
Frontend Developer (Nov 2024 - Jul 2026)
- Designed and owned the architecture of an internal Chat SDK, separating synchronization, persistence, transport, and domain logic from the UI layer.
- Owned development of Help Center applications and their integration into the banking platform.
- Extracted the Help Center from the banking monolith and launched it as an independent service in a new Uzbekistan environment.
- Established CI/CD, deployment, routing, integration, and release flows for the new service in a team without a dedicated DevOps engineer.
- Developed internal tooling around tRPC, Zod, and OpenAPI.
- Investigated complex runtime and cross-platform integration issues, including BFF memory leaks and communication across heterogeneous deployment environments.
- Authored RFCs and design documents, participated in architecture reviews, coordinated changes across frontend and backend teams, and informally mentored engineers.
Junior Frontend Developer (Jun 2022 - Oct 2023)
- Helped build an internal application platform that grew to power more than 80 FinTech applications across 10+ engineering teams.
- Developed shared platform infrastructure including runtime components, authentication, routing, reusable libraries, CI/CD, and deployment flows.
- Initiated and led the migration of approximately 80 applications and their BFF layer from GraphQL to tRPC.
- Prepared the platform for deployment into additional environments as part of international expansion.
- Reworked an internal proxy around composable middleware and caching to improve reliability.
- Integrated rate limiting on top of the Risk Management System.
- Coordinated a major design-system upgrade across internal applications and dependent libraries.
- Upgraded the Node.js runtime used by CI/CD infrastructure.
r1s
Decentralized OCI workload execution fabric over the Reticulum Network Stack.
Designed and built a decentralized execution system in Go for running OCI workloads without a master node, global scheduler, cluster-wide registry, shared database, or mandatory common IP network.
Clients publish workload demand, discover independent allocators over Reticulum, collect capacity offers, and select an execution target.
- Implements decentralized allocator discovery and offer/select scheduling.
- Executes OCI workloads through containerd.
- Provides cryptographic cluster membership and authenticated control-plane communication.
- Uses client-held workload leases and durable workload intent.
- Recovers across client disconnects and allocator restarts.
- Retains execution state and logs locally on allocators.
- Exposes a persistent local gRPC client API with streamed state updates.
Tested across multiple physical devices. An allocator requires only its RNS configuration and can join the execution fabric without centralized cluster infrastructure.
meshbus
Brokerless messaging layer for authenticated peers over mesh networks.
Designed and built a transport-independent messaging library in Go for applications that need peer discovery, direct messaging, and lightweight pub/sub without introducing a central broker.
- Provides authenticated peer discovery and direct peer-to-peer messaging.
- Implements bounded, TTL-based, deduplicated best-effort pub/sub.
- Separates application-level peer identities from transport-specific routes and destinations.
- Treats authenticated transport sessions as the authority for sender identity rather than trusting serialized message metadata.
- Provides shared-secret realm membership with mutual authentication between peers.
- Keeps the core messaging and authentication layers transport-independent and standard-library-only.
- Includes a Reticulum adapter for discovery, authenticated links, channels, sessions, and routing.
Designed as a small networking primitive that can be embedded into distributed systems without introducing centralized messaging infrastructure.
agentrun-openai
OpenAI-compatible HTTP gateway for persistent coding-agent sessions.
Exposes complete coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex through an OpenAI-compatible API while preserving their native tools and runtime.
- Provides dynamic model discovery.
- Streams completions and reasoning.
- Maintains persistent session affinity.
- Restores native sessions after idle eviction or gateway restart.
- Handles long-running agent operations through stream heartbeats.
- Restricts agent execution to configured working directories.
- Maps OpenAI reasoning-effort controls to backend agent capabilities.
- Ships cross-platform releases for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Designed so existing OpenAI-compatible applications can use full coding agents without implementing agent-specific integrations.
Other Engineering Projects
Myteor
Experimental distributed runtime exploring transport, multiplexing, task distribution, and package delivery.
Built as a long-running systems project for experimenting with low-level communication and execution primitives.
- Implemented multipart streaming over raw TCP and multiplexed multiple logical streams over a single connection.
- Designed binary protocols over CBOR and MessagePack.
- Built a master/worker task distribution model with worker capability polling.
- Developed Rust-based SWC plugins for CJS → ESM transformation and rewriting module paths to remote HTTP sources.
- Implemented S3-backed caching proxies for npm, GitHub, and other package and source-data providers.
Denpo
Experimental MTProto Telegram client focused on protocol parsing, code generation, and binary serialization.
Built core protocol tooling from scratch with an emphasis on browser compatibility and strongly typed interfaces.
- Implemented a streaming TL lexer and parser.
- Generated types and protocol bindings directly from Telegram TL schemas.
- Built bidirectional binary serialization and deserialization for MTProto data structures.
- Designed the implementation around browser constraints rather than relying on Node.js-specific primitives.
Electronic Gradebook
Thesis project with end-to-end ownership across the full application stack.
Designed and implemented the system from authentication and RPC contracts to backend infrastructure, data access, SSR, frontend tooling, and CI/CD. Built a custom type-safe RPC layer, OAuth2 flow, ArangoDB ODM, streaming SSR, and supporting development tooling.
Email Template Editor — Yandex School of Frontend Development Hackathon
Team lead for a prototype WYSIWYG editor for Mustache-based email templates.
Led the project and coordinated implementation across the team. Built core application infrastructure including a custom state manager and router, alongside the editor prototype.
Technical focus
Languages: Go, TypeScript, Rust, Python, JavaScript
Distributed systems & networking: Reticulum, Yggdrasil, gRPC, WebSockets, TCP, distributed state, leases, service discovery
AI infrastructure: coding agents, OpenAI-compatible APIs, model routing, retries, fallbacks, provider abstraction, context management
Backend & data: Node.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Redis
Infrastructure: NixOS, Docker / OCI, containerd, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Caddy, Nginx, Grafana
Frontend: React, Next.js, browser APIs