01Profile
Summary
Senior engineer and team lead. 15+ years of experience.
- Now The systems behind a conversational shopping assistant: architecture, APIs and the data layer that let an LLM help users find and buy the right products.
- Team Leads a team of senior engineers; drives adoption of coding agents for clean, high-quality delivery.
- Focus Backend, but full-stack.
- Track record Building and shipping complete products.
Expertise
02Ask about Denis
An AI assistant that has read Denis's CV and project notes. Ask about his experience, stack or projects.
Assistant
03Personal projects
1 active, 7 archived.
Index
Details
AI-generated audio guides for travelers. Tap a place on the map and listen to a guide about it, explore city pages and curated walks, or chat with the in-app AI Travel Agent. Localized into many languages.
Rebuilt from scratch in May 2026 as a web app and a native SwiftUI iOS app, with a native Android app in early development. It follows Keeny (2023–2024) and an earlier React Native app. Denis leads all engineering and technical direction; co-founder Dmitry Frolov works on UI/UX and product.
Stack
Details
GPT City
A chat game set in a city where every character is an AI actor with its own personality, backstory and long-term memory of each player. Characters move around the city with the time of day, and react in character when the player goes quiet.
Players build their own world (locations, places and characters) by talking to an assistant with world-editing tools. The same tools are available as an MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor and other clients. Built solo in about two weeks in April 2026 as an open-source proof of concept.
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Details
Chat Connect
An AI agent in the Chrome side panel that reads the page you're on, answers questions about it, fills in forms and clicks elements. Every tool call is visible in the chat, and each one can wait for approval before it runs. Works with OpenAI models from GPT-4o to GPT-5.
Built in mid-2025, before Perplexity's Comet launched and before Claude for Chrome. Open source, with a small proxy server so the OpenAI key can stay off the browser, and a UI tested in Storybook.
Stack
Details
audiotour.studio
A platform for museums to create AI audio guides at scale. Curators add source material, and the platform writes the guide script, makes family-friendly and accessible versions, translates them into up to 34 languages and narrates them. Every step can be reviewed and edited.
The B2B sibling of audiotour.io. Denis built it end to end in 2024 (frontend, backend and AWS infrastructure). It is no longer online.
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Details
Keeny
The first version of Denis's AI audio-guide app, started in May 2023, months after ChatGPT went mainstream. Tap a landmark on the map and hear a guide generated by GPT from its Wikipedia article, in 16 languages.
Published on the App Store and Google Play: 2,000+ users and 200+ subscriptions sold. Denis built the app, backend and infrastructure end to end. With Keeny, the team completed Y Combinator Startup School and exhibited in the Alpha program at Web Summit in Lisbon.
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Details
GrandTrip
A social app for road trips. Share a trip as a story with its route, photos, videos and practical tips (distance, travel time, car, costs), and like and discuss other travelers' trips in threaded comments that update live.
Built solo as a side project from 2021 to 2023, alongside the job at JetBrains, for iOS, Android and web. Never published.
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Details
Words Game
A mobile word game. Pick a short fun-fact text and build words from its letters, using each letter only once, and level up from 3- to 6-letter words. To move on, at least half of the text's letters must be used.
Built solo in summer 2020 for iOS, Android and web, with progress and best scores saved on the device and an English and Russian UI. Never published.
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Details
vpgta.ru
An unofficial blog platform and social network for students of Penza State Technical University (then Penza State Technological Academy, hence the name). Students wrote blogs and shared files with each other.
Built and launched in 2009, while Denis was still a student and before his first professional web-development job. It ran for about five years and grew to about 500 users.
Stack
04Experience
9 roles since 2010.
Index
Details
Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead · Swap
Backend TypeScript engineer on the Agentic Storefront — a conversational shopping assistant where an LLM helps users search, get recommendations, and buy clothing. Owns the software engineering behind the assistant: the system architecture around the agent — API design, data modelling and storage, and the code patterns and infrastructure for the agent loop, tools, memory, and chat/action history. Also drives the team’s internal adoption of coding agents, building the tooling and practices that let the team ship production code with clean architecture and verified quality.
Team lead for the Agents squad, leading four senior engineers — technical guidance, 1-1s, performance measurement, load distribution, and direct stakeholder communication. Delivery of new features accelerated ~3x under his lead, driven by improved agent tooling and workflows. Also runs workshops and builds tooling for the wider Agentic Storefront team, and conducted ~40 interviews supporting its growth from 8 to 30 engineers.
Previously led the Checkout squad — designed and built a payment-system integration (Adyen) from scratch, processing up to $200K in sales per day at peak. Promoted to team lead following that work, then oversaw the full checkout flow: cart, order management, and integration with e-commerce providers such as Shopify.
Also designed, built and shipped Swap’s Magento integration, its first e-commerce platform integration after Shopify.
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Details
Technical Co-Founder · audiotour.io
Built and shipped the entire product — an AI-generated audio-guide app for travelers. Users tap a point on an interactive map and hear a real-time generated audio guide: an LLM crafts a script from trusted sources, and text-to-speech produces the audio stream on demand. Available as iOS and Android apps plus a web version, localized into 21 languages.
Sole engineer across the full stack: backend, mobile apps, and web client. Partnered with co-founder Dmitry Frolov (UI/UX and product); owned all technical direction and implementation.
Reached ~2,000 users and ~100 one-time purchases. Selected for the Alpha Startup program and exhibited at Web Summit in Lisbon.
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Software Engineer · JetBrains
Frontend developer on TeamCity, JetBrains’ CI/CD server used by 30,000+ customers and millions of users. Built frontend architecture, set up development and CI/CD workflows, reviewed code, mentored interns, and interviewed 30+ candidates (hired 4 senior engineers and 3 students).
- Rewrote the build-log viewer: the old system couldn’t render logs above 10MB and pegged the CPU at 100% for a minute on first render. The new one handles logs up to 1GB in under 3 seconds, with custom search, log-level filtering, collapsible log-tree nodes, soft/no-wrap modes, and ANSI color support.
- Built a React-based UI-extensions system for TeamCity, letting external developers write plugins against a typed API and integrate them into the existing SPA (
@jetbrains/teamcity-api). - Set up the full frontend architecture and workflows for the new TeamCity Cloud sub-product (resource management, user management, notifications, and cloud-specific configuration).
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Senior Frontend Developer · Appulate Inc.
Wrote frontend code for a large product for insurance companies — new features and bug fixes in legacy code. Mentored junior and middle developers and improved development processes.
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Frontend Developer → Engineering Manager · Startups Snacky & Corkly
Joined as a frontend developer (Aug 2015) and was promoted to engineering manager in July 2016.
- Frontend developer. Built a complex SPA with React and Redux on the client and server-side rendering on Node.js. Wrote unit, integration and functional tests with over 95% coverage, and established the whole development process.
- Engineering manager. Managed a technical team of four (developers and a UI/UX designer) building a mobile app. Adapted agile with two-week sprints, set up kanban boards, ran 1-1s and performance reviews, and hired a UI/UX designer.
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Frontend Developer · FunCorp
Built the new website for the entertainment service iFunny (200,000+ daily active users), with a Node.js layer for proxy caching and server-side rendering. The new SEO-optimised site doubled the number of users.
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Junior Developer → Software Developer · moedelo.org
Full-stack developer on a SaaS accounting product. Joined as a junior developer and was promoted to software developer after a year. Key achievement: a webinar subsystem with a streaming player and real-time chat handling 10,000+ live participants.
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Web Developer · Onlinebees
Full-stack developer at a local web studio.
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Freelance Web Developer · Self-employed
E-commerce website development.
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05Education & languages
Education
Master, Engineering, Penza State Technical University 2008 – 2013
Startup School, Y Combinator 2023
Languages
06Achievements
Honours
- 2022
2nd place, JetBrains internal hackathon
Out of 75 teams, with a web app for building good habits.
- 2013
Master's diploma with honours
Penza State Technical University.
- 2009
Winner, university math olympiad
Penza State Technical University. Also competed in the all-Russian math olympiad for engineering students.
- 2006
2nd place nationally, "Zelyony Shum" festival of intellectual games
An open festival of logic, number, word and spatial puzzles held in Zelenograd, Moscow.
- 2006
4th place, Penza Oblast math olympiad
1st place in his home town.
- 2004, 2005
Two-time winner, Penza Oblast street football cup