The arc
I grew up in Siberia, lived in Moscow for a stretch, and now live in Los Angeles. Started designing for the web at 14, late 2000s, and picked up code because handing off design always meant watching it die a little. By 2015 I was full-time freelance.
Before LA, there was more movement than that summary admits: one-way tickets through Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia in 2018; St. Petersburg in 2019; Phuket and Bali right as COVID closed the beaches; then Moscow, the Black Sea, Alanya, Mauritius, and Istanbul before the 2022 move to California. Most of my taste for async work came from that stretch. Scooters, rented apartments, uneven internet, work that had to be portable.
From 2019 to 2025 I was lead product designer at VALK (now DatAI Network), institutional fintech used by 70+ financial institutions across 15+ countries. I designed the product behind $4B+ in managed deals. Multiple industry awards. Press in CNN, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance.
I've been mostly independent since 2022, when I moved to LA. Contracts, retainers, open-source. AI agents, generative-engine optimization, product work I design and write myself.
How I work
Async first. I read every email and usually reply within a day. No standing meetings, no kickoff calls. If we need to sync, we send long messages, not calendar invites.
Tightly scoped. I'd rather start with a small, honest thing than promise a big, vague thing. Most of my best work began as a one-week experiment.
End-to-end. I design and write the code. The handoff between the two is where products go to die, so I prefer not to do it.
Direct. If I think something won't work, I'll say so. If I'm not the right person for the job, I'll say that too, early.
Currently
Dory. An open-source shared memory layer for AI agents. The project I keep coming back to between contracts.
GEO research. The web is changing because AI is the reader now. I wrote an SSRN paper on the gap between SEO and GEO and keep updating it as the answer engines move.
A book. Don't Replace Me. Notes from a designer-engineer who keeps shipping anyway.
And the occasional weirder side project. Usually firmware, agents, or self-hosted infra. Most of them live at /things.
Off-screen
Gym. Home server in the closet, running my own infrastructure because depending on five SaaS providers for the things I actually own seems like a bad bet. Hardware experiments, mostly ESP-class boards and small things that talk to each other. Travel when I can. Collect cameras and devices I don't need. Mostly just enjoying LA.
