Origin
I was born in Ukraine and grew up between two languages before adding a third. Cleveland, Ohio is home now.
I taught myself to code through small projects and a lot of failed attempts. Somewhere in there I burned out for close to a year and stopped writing code entirely. What brought me back was an internship at Cleveland Clinic, where a model I'd trained ended up in front of surgeons. That's when AI stopped being a subject and became the thing I build.
How I work
I build retrieval from scratch before I reach for a framework, because I want to know what's underneath. I'd rather publish the eval that caught a 90% train/test leak in my own work than a demo that hides it.
Along the way I've co-founded a startup, shipped inside a hospital's security team, and run Discord communities for the products I've worked on. Each one taught me something a course couldn't.
What I believe
Shipping isn't finishing. Shipping is proving something works once.
Off the keyboard
Guitar, and I'll be playing it for the rest of my life. The gym most evenings. Long conversations in English, Ukrainian, or Russian, whichever one the other person thinks in.
What's next
I'm looking for an AI engineering role or contract where I own retrieval, evaluation, or agent infrastructure end to end. If that sounds like your team, email me or read the résumé.