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Kristiyan Ivanov

Kristiyan Ivanov

Founder & CTO at BetterDB; Director of Engineering

kristiyan-ivanov
Bulgaria
Joined April 2026
Favicon imagekris.build
Favicon imagegithub.com
Favicon imagedevrix.com
Favicon imagebetterdb.com

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Software Engineering Leaders

Summary

Founding engineer and product-focused CTO who builds observability tooling for in-memory databases. He created BetterDB to persist and analyze ephemeral Valkey/Redis operational data (slowlog, COMMANDLOG, cluster slot stats) and to expose that data via Prometheus and MCP tooling so both humans and AI agents can investigate incidents. betterdb+2
Experienced engineering leader with hands-on product and team leadership experience, including leading RedisInsight and holding Director-level roles; combines managerial responsibilities with technical ownership and public technical writing. devrix+2
Active open-source contributor and builder in public: maintains BetterDB repos (monitor, memory), publishes technical blog posts and practical tooling (CLI, Docker images), and shares benchmarks and methodology openly so others can reproduce and verify claims. github+2
Public-facing writer and speaker who explains engineering trade-offs and tooling gaps—publishes long-form essays on hiring and engineering practices, technical deep dives on monitoring and Prometheus integration, and speaks on podcasts about cache tooling and observability. gitconnected+2

Work

Education

Projects

Writing

Debugging Valkey with MCP: When Your AI Can Query Your Monitoring

March 1, 2026

Explains how BetterDB persists Valkey operational data and exposes it via an MCP server so AI clients can query monitoring data in natural language for faster incident investigation and agent use cases.

Favicon imagebetterdb.com

What BetterDB Exposes to Prometheus (And Why It Matters)

March 1, 2026

Technical guide to the Prometheus metrics BetterDB exports, recommended PromQL queries, and reasoning for persisting ephemeral Valkey data into the observability stack.

Favicon imagebetterdb.com

Valkey: What Valkey's new primitives tell us about the tools we need

March 1, 2026

Technical analysis of Valkey primitives like COMMANDLOG and CLUSTER SLOT-STATS and an argument for tooling that persists and surfaces Valkey-native operational data.

Favicon imagevalkey.io

The SWE Job Market Is Broken — And Both Sides Are Making It Worse

February 1, 2026

Essay reflecting on the software engineering hiring market, candidate behaviors, and company responsibilities; recounts running a founding engineer hiring process and lessons learned.

Favicon imagelevelup.gitconnected.com

Hobbies

Home gym training (kettlebells), cocktail experimentation, cooking, reading, and writing. kris+1

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