Go, Rust, and the parts of the stack most people avoid.

Solving problems that don't come with a playbook

Vladyslav Lukyanenko

Senior systems engineer

Previously — Opacity Labs  ·  Formal  ·  nate  ·  TicketGenie

Available now
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Portrait of Vladyslav Lukyanenko

— About

About me

I'm a systems engineer who spends most of my time on the parts of the stack that aren't documented. Over the past few years that's meant reverse engineering, low-level systems work, backend infrastructure, performance optimization, and building things where understanding what's actually happening under the hood is the whole job.

My background is mostly Go and Rust — plus databases, networking, and infrastructure — but the stack matters less to me than the problem. I'm at my best when the problem is ambiguous, technically hard, and the obvious solution is wrong.

Most recently I was Tech Lead at Opacity Labs, which I joined as a founding engineer. Before that I was a founding senior engineer at Formal and led teams at TicketGenie and Graphlabs.

Analyze

  • Reverse engineering
  • Low-level networking
  • TLS & ja3
  • Protocol analysis

Fix

  • Distributed debugging
  • Performance profiling
  • Monolith refactors
  • Database tuning

Solve

  • Go & Rust
  • Systems architecture
  • Infrastructure design
  • AWS & Cassandra
See my work

— Portfolio

Selected work

Four problems that arrived without documentation, and what came out the other side.

  • Opacity Labs

    Founding Engineer → Tech Lead · 2024–2026

    zkTLS infrastructure for proving data from any website without revealing what it says. Built the piece that collapses a third-party API into one line of developer code.

    Rust · Lua · TypeScript · Swift

    $12M

    SEED RAISED · FIRST HIRE

  • Formal ( YC S20 )

    Founding Senior Engineer · 2023

    A protocol-aware proxy that reads database traffic at the wire level, so access policy applies per query instead of per network. Moved the system to event-driven.

    Go · Kafka · Protobuf · AWS

    $5M

    SEED RAISED AFTER JOINING

  • nate

    Senior Software Engineer · 2022

    Automated checkout across any merchant site — which meant taking apart the anti-automation systems standing in the way.

    Go · Python · Kubernetes

    3 MONTHS

    ZERO TO AUTOMATION AT SCALE

  • TicketGenie

    Development Team Lead · 2021–2023

    A distributed Ticketmaster scraper, and the monolith-to-microservices refactor underneath it.

    Go · RabbitMQ · AWS EKS · Redis

    1000s/sec

    REQUESTS SUSTAINED

Some of this work sits behind NDAs. The open-source side — reCAPTCHA v2 and Cloudflare internals — is on GitHub.

Ask me about it

— Testimonials

People I've shipped with

Peers, a direct report, and people who managed me. Unedited except for length.

MANAGED ME DIRECTLY
At Opacity we often asked our engineers to take on challenges we didn't yet know how to solve ourselves. Vlad was instrumental in designing an approach that let us ship a compiled library on client devices paired with remotely hosted, upgradable instruction sets — so we could build for production while still applying hot-fixes without delay.

Aaron Marz

CTO, Opacity Labs

Aaron Marz
WORKED ON THE SAME TEAM
Whenever I came to him with a technical challenge, he was generous with his guidance and had an excellent ability to cut through complexity, find a clear path forward, and help those around him expand their knowledge.

Harvey de Meester

Engineer, Opacity Labs & HVDM

REPORTED TO ME DIRECTLY
He is the teammate every engineer wants: always willing to help, generous with useful insight, quick to find the needle in the haystack when something breaks. What impressed me most is how he handles the unknown — he adapts fast, attacks problems from different angles, and is usually the first to jump into a new and challenging project.

Adrian P.

Rust & Systems Engineer, Opacity Labs

PROJECT MANAGER ON MY TEAM
I relied on him to understand the technical side of our work — breaking down feasibility, effort, and downstream issues, all critical to planning and prioritizing engineering work. I also appreciated how straightforward he was: I trusted Vlad to give me his actual assessment rather than simply tell me what I wanted to hear.

Armando Pardillo, PhD

Technical Project Manager, Opacity Labs

Armando Pardillo
All recommendations

— Contact

Available now

Building something difficult?

I'm looking for my next one. Senior Software Engineer, Systems Engineer or Reverse Engineer roles, with teams working on technically ambitious products.

[email protected]
Linkedin GitHub Download CV
Based in
Madrid, Spain · UTC+2 · Remote-first
Languages
English · Spanish · Ukrainian · Russian · Polish
Reply time
Usually within a day