Vitaly Koryakin
Principal engineer, tech lead, leading teams on AI products.
On this page
I bring predictability back to development: deadlines hold, changes get cheaper, and the product does not depend on irreplaceable people. A missed deadline I treat as a systemic error: I find the cause, remove it and bring the team back to a normal pace. I own the result end to end — the decisions, the agreements with the customer, and an environment where the team never has to be heroic. More than 20 years in software, ten of them responsible for a 24/7 platform for enterprise clients.
Results
- AI product for a network of clinics: taken over a month before delivery, in chaos; shipped on time without a single incident; Yandex B2B Tech Awards.
- Perl → Python: the legacy of a 24/7 platform moved to a modern stack without stopping it, and stopped being a business risk.
- Onboarding a data source: 3–7 days instead of 30, for a hundred-odd providers.
- Customer reporting: stopped breaking every month for 100+ managers at 20 companies.
Path
- 2025–2026 — Raft, AI Labs. Team lead and tech lead of a team of 10: requirements, architecture, delivery, sign-off with the customer.
- 2015–2024 — Northern Light, Boston. From software engineer to principal engineer. Responsible for the stability of a 24/7 platform of search portals for the management of J&J, IBM, HP and Intel.
- 1999–2015 — Saint Petersburg and Stockholm. Development, build systems and test automation: Business Link, ORC, EMC, Scoros.
How I work
- Missed deadlines and overtime are not heroism but a systemic error, fixed at every level.
- Measure first, then optimise; proven technology over novelty.
- The team's environment is the leader's responsibility: what they encourage, what they allow and what they stop.
Beyond work
The gym, the kitchen and a cyberpunk novel in progress.