Software engineer and architect based in Amsterdam. I work across regulated and safety-critical environments and on AI engineering in production.
Backend, platform, and cloud engineering across B2B SaaS products – e-commerce, workforce management, real estate, aviation. Earlier roots in software for internet-exchange-scale networks. CISSP, GCSA.
Architecture: Maintainable systems that still make sense a year from now.
Delivery: Predictable shipping with minimal ceremony.
Operations and security: Infrastructure that scales with the team instead of slowing it down.
GenAI in production: LLM integration, RAG, and observability. Building toward agentic systems and MCP-based tool use.
AI engineering
- Prefix poisoning: how one line disables prompt caching
- The literal reader
- The EU AI Act for small companies
- The 1M context window, and what it actually costs you
Security
- Solving the Openfire Lab blue-team challenge
- Solving the ShadowCitadel blue-team challenge
- Crimediggers: a cybersecurity challenge
Hardware
- Touch-controlled table lamp with ESP32 and WLED
- How I spent a weekend reinventing a 50-cent chip
- DIY Bluetooth Kobo page-turner remote with ESP32 and Lilka
- EgressLens − monitor outbound network activity from Python apps running in Docker.
- LLM Observability PoC − a Langfuse-based PoC for LLM observability in Python.
- Languages: Python, Ruby, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript
- Cloud and infra: AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform
- GenAI: LLM integration, RAG, Langfuse
- Security certs: CISSP, GCSA
- Amsterdam, NL
- contact@igortkanov.com
- LinkedIn · Blog
Hardware tinkering on the side – ESP32, sensors, radio, basic circuits. Electrical engineering breadboard