Award-winning Senior Staff Engineer
& Secure Systems Leader

Darya Koko, also known as Darya Kokovikhina, is an award-winning Senior Staff Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience designing and evolving secure, scalable distributed systems across banking, fintech, and healthcare. Recognised with the Best Secure Coder Award at the NZ Women in Security Awards 2023, she brings a rare combination of deep payments domain expertise, platform engineering leadership, and a secure-by-design philosophy to every system she builds.

As a senior technical leader, Darya has driven large-scale modernisation programmes at institutions including Kiwibank, architecting cloud-native payment systems within PCI-regulated environments while enabling engineering teams to deliver faster, safer, and with confidence. Her expertise spans the full stack of secure delivery — from EFTPOS transaction flows, 3D Secure, and HSM-backed cryptography, to zero-trust API design, threat modelling, and secure SDLC practices.

She is a published author, having contributed to the NZ DEFSEC Security Magazine and the Women in Security Magazine, sharing insights on the future of women in cybersecurity and technology. At the frontier of the next engineering era, Darya is actively applying AI and multi-agent orchestration to improve developer workflows — with a governance-first approach to responsible production adoption.