We make AI for creators and small businesses. They use Cetient to engage their audience, clients, and customers: answer questions, collect information, offer products and services, help with purchases, refer to partners, and more.

Led the SEO team responsible for Pinterest's #1 non-direct source of new user growth.First, re-focused the team on getting the basics right. Then changed Pinterest's SEO strategy from a "throw everything at the wall" approach to publishing only high-quality and high-conversion content.This changed the trajectory of pre-pandemic SEO traffic growth from flat to over 30% YoY growth. Post-pandemic, it ensured that traffic stays above 2019 levels.Grew a new generation of engineering leaders: staff engineers and new EMs.Results:1. Redesigned landing pages to ensure that they always have the image the user saw on Google's search result pages. This resolved the #1 complaint from users about Pinterest SEO.2. Allowed search users to always view the image without creating a Pinterest account. Collaborated with other Growth teams to gradually open up the logged-out experience for browsing. This resolved the #2 complaint from users about Pinterest SEO.3. Replaced unreliable online (at the time of page rendering) SEO metadata generation with reliable offline data workflows. This increased the number of pages with high-quality metadata from ~70% to 99%.4. Improved landing page performance by at least 2x and demonstrated that faster pages rank higher. Established continuous collaboration with the Performance team to maintain the gains.5. Built the SEO experimentation framework to track the full funnel from SEO landing to user conversion, retention, and revenue. Collaborated with the PA/DS team to create a decision-making framework that reduced experiment ship decision time from 3 months to 2 weeks.6. Designed and built an SEO content publishing platform. It applies rules to select the highest quality content and uses the ML model to rank and predict which will convert better. The workflows run daily!7. Adapted to the SEO ecosystem changes: shifted priority from image search to text search, and replaced AMP pages with high-performance native mobile web pages.

Led the Growth team since its inception. Grew the team from 3 to 11 engineers in less than 1.5 years. The team owned driver acquisition (organic, paid), consumer acquisition (paid, SEO, referrals), and consumer activation (promotions).Results:1. Rebuilt the dasher (driver) acquisition flow to allow fully automated self-signup for drivers who can pass the background checks without further human review. This significantly increased the conversion rate from lead to signed-up dasher and allowed DoorDash to start running Facebook new driver incentive campaigns (ex: earn $1000 guaranteed for the first two weeks) that all the other competitors were doing at the time.2. Built in-app upsell banners and messages on top of the promotion system. This allowed us to run platform-wide customer activation campaigns. Most successful were the first and second delivery free campaigns that led to a double-digit increase in deliveries!3. Made the referral system configurable by marketers. Ensured that the referral workflow is resilient to abuse/overuse and always grants bonuses to customers who earned them.4. Built the first version of the subscription system called DashPass in collaboration with the Core Consumer team. The subscriptions drove up deliveries per customer and increased retention.5. Increased lead to first delivery conversion tracking accuracy from 70% to 95%+. This helped the marketing team to track more accurately track expenses and scale our paid marketing campaigns.

Managed all technology projects at Eligo Energy, the retail energy supplier.Oversaw customer relationship management (CRM), billing, call center, online customer acquisition, partner portals, and other software projects. Coordinated Eligo's open source contributions.Results:1. Built online residential customer acquisition flow from scratch. Integrated it with the call center for dormant lead reactivation.2. Built a three-sided marketplace software for commercial energy sales. The marketplace allowed energy brokers to purchase energy on behalf of their commercial customers from multiple producers.

Wrote and published the "Ruby Performance Optimization: Why Ruby Is Slow, and How to Fix It" book.The book explains how to:1. Write Ruby code that has adequate performance without any further optimization.2. Know weak (performance-wise) areas in Ruby and be able to identify potentially slow parts of the code during development before the code is deployed.3. Optimize memory consumption that is often responsible for 80% of performance degradation. Know enough Ruby internals to do that.4. Set up performance-oriented coding practices and processes, use optimization tools

Led the fully remote team of software engineers, designers, and IT engineers building Acunote - online project management and Scrum software.Over the years, developed a project management tool that's useful for individuals, teams, and corporate multi-team customers. This way Acunote quickly reached profitability and stayed that way through the Great Recession.

Designed and built from scratch the first release of Acunote - online project management and Scrum software. When the company grew, hired engineers, and set up development and release processes.Acunote offers hierarchical task management with analytics that rolled up task level data to team and company levels. At the same time, its spreadsheet-like user interface makes it easy for individual contributors to record their progress. To this day, there's no other project management alternative that offers these features in one package.

Taught Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Expert Systems classes.

Spent tons of my free time as a student and graduate student contributing to KDE!In 2002/2003 maintained Kugar - xml-based report generator that was a part of the KOffice suite. Improved its backend code and wrote a report template designer for Kugar called Kudesigner. In 2003 became a KDevelop developer. KDevelop is the integrated development environment for KDE. Started with bug fixes, then wrote many plugins for KDevelop, including Ruby language support. Served as a project maintainer responsible for product and strategy decisions. Released all stable versions of KDevelop from 3.0.1 to 3.5.5 and several 4.0 betas.Co-authored the current KDevelop plugin-based core architecture and implementation (together with Roberto Raggi and Andreas Pakulat). Designed and implemented user interface for both 3.x and 4.x/5.x versions of KDevelop.Modern IDEs like VS Code are now built with the same core principles we first tried back in 2000s: folder-based project management, flexible plugin-based system, the abstraction layer between language support and IDE similar to modern-day LSP, and more.

Co-founded the company together with my two colleagues from the university. Ki-Inform did various types consulting: software consulting, business development, business process optimization and project management.Was responsible for all types of software consulting work. Hired two employees. Developed small business automation software, installed and integrated application servers, performed software and hardware maintenance, and set up company technical infrastructure.