Roman Elizarov is a Project Lead for Kotlin at JetBrains and currently focuses on the Kotlin language design in the role of Lead Language Designer. In 2000 Roman Elizarov had graduated from St. Petersburg ITMO and started his career as a professional software developer. During his undergraduate study, he participated in International Collegiate Programming Contests (ICPC). Since 1997 and until now Roman serves as a Chief Judge of Northern Eurasia Region of ICPC. He also maintains his academic ties and teaches a course on concurrent and distributed programming at ITMO. Roman Elizarov had worked for most of his career at Devexperts, where he designed and developed high-performance trading software for leading brokerage firms and market data delivery services that routinely handle millions of events per second. He is an expert in Java and JVM, particularly in concurrency, real-time data processing, algorithms, and performance optimizations for modern architectures. He has been working on Kotlin in JetBrains since 2016 and has contributed to the design of Kotlin coroutines and the development of the Kotlin coroutines library.