She is the Head of Product Development at iGaming.com and the Head of Product for Casino.net.
The short version: she trained as a philologist, ended up building casino comparison products, and still only plays blackjack when she is in a real casino.
| Lives in: | Varna, Bulgaria |
|---|---|
| Education: | Bachelor’s degree in Italian Philology |
| Other Qualifications: | Specialisations in translation and pedagogy, front-end development courses |
| Certificates: | Prompt Engineering, AI for Education and Self Education, AI for Images, Video and Audio, Vibe Coding Basics (SoftUni) |
| Interest in Gambling: | 18+ years |
| Gambling Experience: | 13+ years |
| Gambling Expertise: | Casino reviews, compliance |
| Other Areas of Expertise: | Linguistics, translation, content creation |
| Joined Casino.net: | March 2024 |
| Position at Casino.net: | Head of Product |
| Written Articles at Casino.net: | 58 |
| Joined iGaming.com: | June 2013 |
| Position at iGaming.com: | Head of Product Development |
Languages came first and gambling second. Katya came to the industry from Italian philology and freelance translation, and the route explains a lot about how she works.
Katya grew up in Varna as a creative child who painted, read and made things. Languages arrived early and mostly through her family: English in kindergarten, Russian in first grade, then Italian, which she started teaching herself at twelve. Two years later she entered high school with Italian as her first language and Russian as her second, and carried on with English on her own.
Italian philology at Sofia University was the natural continuation. She specialised in both translation and pedagogy, picked up some Spanish, and kept the English specialisation going. Freelancing started while she was still a student: translation, language courses, and subtitling films for two festivals in Varna, which is where she learned the craft and how to edit someone else’s subtitles.
| Place | Job |
|---|---|
| Freelance Nov 2010 – Dec 2014 | Translator, Editor, Content Writer and Language Teacher Italian and English lessons, translation and film subtitling for festivals in Varna, plus writing for an Italian sports site and a language teaching blog. |
| iGaming.com Jun 2013 – Nov 2017 | Web Content Creator and Editor Reviews, blog posts, comparison pages and guides across iGaming.com projects, alongside research, proofreading and editing. Keyword research, page structure and HTML came with the job. |
| iGaming.com Nov 2017 – Oct 2019 | Head of Content Led one team that still held the writers, the project managers and the product developers together. |
| iGaming.com Oct 2019 – Current | Head of Product Development Owns product development for the Varna office after the content team split into three specialisations. |
| Casino.net Mar 2024 – Current | Head of Product Took the role during the platform’s inception phase and works daily with design, front-end, back-end, research, content, legal and social media. |
| Education | Degree |
|---|---|
| A. S. Pushkin Language School, Varna Sep 2001 – Jun 2006 | Secondary education, Italian language and literature Italian as first language and Russian as second, with English continued independently alongside them. |
| Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski Sep 2006 – Jun 2010 | Bachelor’s degree in Italian Philology Specialisations in translation and pedagogy, with Spanish added and the English specialisation continued. https://www.uni-sofia.bg |
Katya’s linguistic background got her in the door. iGaming.com hired her as an Italian content writer in June 2013, and the company’s needs moved her onto English content shortly after. It was still a start-up then, so nobody wrote content and nothing else: web development, online marketing, content optimisation, project management and team leading all came attached.
She was promoted to Head of Content while that one team still held the writers, the project managers and the product developers. When it split into those three specialisations, she took over product development for the Varna office.
Hired to write in Italian, moved to English within months, and learned the rest of the production stream because a start-up has no spare hands.
Led writers, project managers and product developers as a single team, back when content still covered all three.
Took product development for the Varna office when the content team split into its three specialisations.
She wants Casino.net to cover all operators on all legal markets in time, and to give players more opportunities to engage and build a real community.
Casino.net is the most ambitious project Katya has worked on, and one that could not have been pulled off a few years ago. On most affiliate sites, commercial gain shapes the rankings. Casino.net is built to rank operators on merit: no operator pays for its position, and the methodology and the scoring algorithm are published so a reader can check them. The one place the sales team has a say is Our Monthly Picks, a toggle the reader switches on themselves, which can reflect new offers and better deals but never touches the main ranking.
The plan from here is coverage first: every operator in every legal market, with guides built on facts rather than opinion. The research database behind every ranking already holds 866 operators across more than 80 markets, 2611 country-level operator records and 4305 slots, and it only grows. After that comes the part she is most curious about, which is giving players more ways to take part instead of only reading, work she shares credit for with the rest of the wider team.
Work hard, play harder, and play safe while you do it.
Katya’s expertise came from volume and from variety. As a content writer she covered many topics, for many markets, in several languages, and she stepped into most of the roles in the production stream along the way. That combination gives her a wide view of the whole field rather than a deep view of one corner of it.
Katya has written hundreds of casino, slots, roulette and blackjack reviews, along with payment method and software provider pages.
Around those came articles and blog posts: gambling films on the lighter end, bonus terms and player protection studies on the serious one. Working across markets taught her that a page is rewritten for a market rather than translated into it, and that the rules differ so much from one market to the next that checking compliance and promoting only legal operators comes before anything else.
In her first years, before the company had a research team, Katya gathered the information herself: registering at the casinos, checking every detail against the operator’s own site and cross-referencing it before it went into an article.
That work now sits with a separate research team in the company, which supports the product developers, product owners and content writers and maintains the database the whole site is built on. A project as dynamic as Casino.net leans on them heavily. Having done the manual version is why she is strict about where a number came from.
The list below is the working range rather than a highlight reel. It is also why she tends to spot the gap between what a page claims and what the data behind it actually supports.
Katya writes about the whole catalogue and plays a narrow part of it. Both of her picks reward a decision, which is what she looks for in a game.
Blackjack is Katya’s favourite because luck is only half of it, and every hand asks for a decision. She has worked on several blackjack-focused iGaming.com projects, written a long run of blackjack game reviews, and prepared strategy cards for the games she covered. In a brick-and-mortar casino it is the only game she plays.
Texas hold’em is not strictly a casino game, though plenty of casino halls run it. Katya likes it for the opposite reason to blackjack: the house is not the opponent, so skill counts for more, and so do psychology and patience.
Her answer is not about strategy or bankroll management. It is about who else is at the table.
For me gambling has always been entertainment. What I did not understand early on is that for a lot of people it is a serious problem. I have seen a few of those cases up close, and each one made me more invested in responsible gambling. Gambling should be fun, a form of entertainment, and never a way out of debt, a scheme or a goal.
Responsible gambling belongs at the foundation everything else stands on. Regulation, legislation, operators and affiliates should all be built on it, and a site whose whole purpose is ranking operators cannot treat it as a notice at the bottom of the page.
Katya did not go looking for the gambling industry. By the time she arrived, it had already been in the house for twenty years.
Gambling has been in my life for as long as I can remember. When I was five or six my dad worked security in a bingo hall. By the time I was a teenager my mum had become a semi-professional poker player, winning a run of online freerolls, some with 5000 players, until Black Friday in 2011 closed the US market and took the freerolls with it. She was not ready to start over, and that is how she stopped. My brother holds a croupier’s certificate. So when I ended up in this industry, nobody at home was particularly surprised.
My first time inside a real casino was at 18, the legal age in Bulgaria, for a poker tournament I played alongside both my parents. There were not enough tables, so qualifying ran in two groups, and after ours got through we had a long wait. I wandered off to look at the games and found a couple of friends at the roulette table. My mum got a bit worried and handed me 20 leva, about 10€, to put on roulette, hoping I would lose it, get disappointed and never touch the wheel again.
I did not know much, but red and black felt safe enough. A few spins later I was 7 leva up, so I cashed out, gave my mum her 20 back and kept the 7. The poker went less well: all three of us made the final, and none of us finished in the money. Two years later I did win one, a small 20-player tournament at a casino.
The other lesson from that first night came from a friend of my mum’s, who kept coming back to my parents for more money every time her own ran out, chasing odd combinations of numbers. Her line was ‘it’s not fun if you don’t bet the electricity money’. That was the first time I understood that some people have a serious problem with gambling. The same woman could not sleep if she knew there was even $5 left in her online bingo account. She had to get up and play it. Watching her and my 7 leva in the same evening taught me more about gambling than any strategy card since.
She likes music, books and a full table, usually all three at once.
I am a melomaniac, a bookworm and a foodie. My perfect evening is prepping a meal with an audiobook in my headphones, then welcoming guests to a hearty meal with good music in the background.
I love to dance and take lessons when I can, and I love learning new things. I keep enrolling in courses, usually ones that sit somewhere between what I am personally interested in and what the job needs next.
Here are some recommended reads from our site by other authors:
The licensed operator table and the scores behind it.
How the market splits between the provinces.
One province with its own regulator and its own rules.
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