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Alexander Krastev

I automate back-office work — with software robots and with AI

I spent ten years inside a bank's payment operations, then moved to building the robots that do that work instead. That order matters: I automate back-office processes because I ran them, not because I read about them.

Based in Sofia, working with companies anywhere.

Role RPA Developer & AI Automation Engineer Languages Bulgarian, English Contact alex.krastev@aikautomation.com

What I do

Five things, and they overlap: most real projects are a robot and a model doing one job between them.

Process automation RPA

Software robots that log into the systems you already have, move data between them, and do the repetitive work a person does today.

Built with UiPath and IBM RPA Automation Studio, tested properly, and supported after they go live.

Document processing AI

Invoices, bank statements, contracts, scans, photos taken on a phone. The AI reads them, checks the numbers add up, flags a supplier it has never seen before, and writes the result into your Excel, your database or your accounting system.

No typing, and no template to maintain for every new supplier.

Agents that talk to people AI

An assistant that answers your phone in Bulgarian and English, replies on WhatsApp and Viber, and books appointments straight into your calendar.

It always says it is an AI — since August that is the law in Europe, and I build it into the code rather than leave it to the wording of a prompt.

On your own server On-premise

Everything I build can run entirely inside your building. Your documents, your customers' data and the AI model itself never leave it.

For a bank, an accounting office or a clinic, that is usually the whole question.

Testing and QA QA

Test scenarios and documentation, functional and regression testing, Playwright automation.

Everything I hand over has been tested the way I was trained to test.

How the UiPath robots are built

A robot that works on the day it is handed over is the easy part. These three choices decide whether it still works in a year — and whether you are tied to the person who built it.

REFramework, customised Standard

Built on UiPath's own Robotic Enterprise Framework — the template UiPath developers are trained on — rather than a one-off script. Any UiPath developer can pick the project up and know where they are.

I work from my own customised version of it: the structure and the vocabulary are the standard ones, the handling around them is tightened from what production actually breaks on.

Orchestrator queues Scale & retry

Work arrives as items in an Orchestrator queue rather than a list inside the robot. Several robots can share one workload, an item that fails is retried on its own instead of stopping the run, and a poisoned item is set aside rather than repeated for ever.

You can see, at any moment, what is waiting, what is done and what failed — without asking me.

Settings outside the code No redeploy

Every path, switch, limit and constant lives outside the workflow. Changing where a file lands, or who gets the report, is an edit to a setting — not a change to the robot and not a new release.

My version reads those settings three ways, and the project picks whichever suits the client: from Orchestrator assets, so an administrator changes a value in the browser and every robot using it follows; from an Excel configuration file, so the person who owns the process can open it and edit it themselves; or both at once, part from each — the sensitive and shared values held centrally, the everyday ones left in the spreadsheet where the business team can reach them.

The Excel-configuration approach comes from the well-known Excel-queue frameworks and is not my work. The layer that reads either source, or a mix of the two, inside an Orchestrator-queue framework, is.

Where this comes from

I know what a payment looks like when it goes wrong.

WhenWhat
2025 → now RPA Developer / QA, RobosizeME — end-to-end UiPath automation for hospitality, plus the test documentation and regression testing behind it.
2023 → 2025 RPA Developer / Consultant, Service Centrix — software robots driving APIs and user interfaces with IBM RPA Automation Studio: built, tested, deployed to production and maintained afterwards.
2018 → 2023 Operational accountant, BG Line — daily reporting, bank statements, invoices and credit notes, reconciliations, EDI. The processes I now automate, done by hand.
2006 → 2017 Senior expert, payment operations, ProCredit Bank — SEPA and SWIFT payments, non-SEPA and Greek payments via DIAS, AML investigations, direct debits, pensions and insurance administration.

When you describe a broken process to me, there is a good chance I have done it by hand.

Proof, not a portfolio

AIK — the platform this page sits on

I built AIK, a complete AI automation platform, on my own, at night, over months. Its agents read documents, answer the phone, and run processes made of several steps. It runs in the cloud or entirely on your own machine.

The part worth checking is the accountability. Everything it produces is signed, so a number changed afterwards shows up as tampering. Every action is written to a log where each entry is sealed to the one before it, so nothing can quietly disappear. And it always declares itself an AI — on the phone, in chat, on WhatsApp, and in a marker other software can read.

See what it does →  ·  How it handles security →

Tools I work with

Also: QA methodology, networking fundamentals, information security and ethical hacking — certified rather than claimed, and the reason the security page exists.

UiPath Academy

Forty-four diplomas of completion, issued by UiPath between April 2025 and February 2026. Two of them are the full learning plans; the other forty-two are the courses that make them up. These are training diplomas — they are not the paid UiPath Certified Professional exam, and this page does not present them as one.

Automation Developer Professional Learning plan

Completed 1 February 2026. The advanced plan: REFramework in depth, Orchestrator queues and triggers, coded automation, testing, version control.

Open the diploma (PDF) →

Automation Developer Associate Learning plan

Completed 1 February 2026. The foundation plan: Studio, selectors and UI automation, data manipulation, Excel and email, error handling, logging, Orchestrator.

Open the diploma (PDF) →

The forty-two course diplomas behind them
  • Feb 01, 2026Practice with REFramework (v2023.10)
  • Feb 01, 2026Version Control Systems Integration in Studio
  • Feb 01, 2026Object Repository in Studio
  • Jun 25, 2025UiPath Test Cloud Overview (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025Build Automations with Solution Accelerators (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025Attended Automation Framework Triggers and Forms in Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025Invoke Method and Invoke Code in Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025Remote Debugging with Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025AI Computer Vision with Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 05, 2025Coded Automation for Testing (v2023.10)
  • May 02, 2025Advanced UI Automation with Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 02, 2025Advanced Data Manipulation with Studio (v2023.10)
  • May 02, 2025Orchestrator Triggers and Monitoring (v2023.10)
  • Apr 30, 2025Building a REFramework Project with Tabular Data (v2023.10)
  • Apr 29, 2025Building a REFramework Project with Orchestrator Queues (v2023.10)
  • Apr 29, 2025Introduction to Robotic Enterprise Framework (v2023.10)
  • Apr 29, 2025State Machines in Studio (v2023.10)
  • Apr 28, 2025UiPath automation implementation methodology fundamentals (v2024)
  • Apr 28, 2025Project Organization in Studio
  • Apr 28, 2025RPA Testing with Studio
  • Apr 28, 2025Workflow Analyzer in Studio
  • Apr 28, 2025UiPath Integration Service Overview
  • Apr 25, 2025Working with Orchestrator Resources as an Automation Developer
  • Apr 25, 2025Orchestrator Overview for Automation Developers
  • Apr 24, 2025Introduction to Logging in Studio
  • Apr 24, 2025Data Manipulation with Data Tables in Studio
  • Apr 24, 2025PDF Automation in Studio
  • Apr 23, 2025Email Automation in Studio
  • Apr 23, 2025Working with Local Files and Folders in Studio
  • Apr 22, 2025Error and Exception Handling in Studio
  • Apr 22, 2025Debugging in Studio
  • Apr 22, 2025Selectors in Studio Deep Dive
  • Apr 22, 2025UI Automation Descriptors in Studio
  • Apr 17, 2025UI Automation Synchronization with Studio
  • Apr 16, 2025Data Manipulation with Strings in Studio
  • Apr 16, 2025Data Manipulation with Lists and Dictionaries in Studio
  • Apr 15, 2025User Interface (UI) Automation with Modern Design in Studio
  • Apr 14, 2025Excel Automation with the Modern Experience in Studio
  • Apr 14, 2025Control Flow in Studio
  • Apr 11, 2025Variables, Constants and Arguments in Studio
  • Apr 11, 2025Build your first automation process with Studio
  • Apr 10, 2025Explore automation development with UiPath

Certificates

Each one links to the issuer's own verification page, so you do not have to take my word for it. The issuer is named on every line — a course diploma is not a professional certification, and this table does not blur the two.

YearCertificateIssuer
2024Certified Python DeveloperW3Schools
2024Mastering Generative AI: LLMs, Prompt Engineering & MoreUdemy
2024Playwright Automation Testing from Scratch with FrameworkUdemy
2024AWS Cloud Practitioner EssentialsW3Schools
2024Networking: Network Fundamentals, Wireshark & Packet TracerUdemy · Oak Academy
2024Diploma in Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP 2019)Alison — course diploma, not the (ISC)² certification
2024Diploma in Ethical Hacking TechniquesAlison
2024Diploma in Cyber SecurityAlison
2024SQL (Intermediate)HackerRank
2023SQL (Basic)HackerRank
2023IBM Robotic Process Automation — Basic, Intermediate, AdvancedIBM
2023Automation Testing with Java and WebDriverSkillo
2023Quality Assurance EngineerSkillo

Get in touch

Tell me the process. I will tell you honestly whether it is worth automating — sometimes the answer is no, and that is worth knowing before you pay for it.

Emailalex.krastev@aikautomation.com
LinkedInAlexander Krastev
WhereSofia, Bulgaria