About — kig.re

Engineering leader and open-source author with 25+ years across distributed systems, scalability, and developer tooling — now focused on applied AI and AI-first engineering.

I've spent my career making applications fast, resilient, and pleasant to operate — from scaling Wanelo on PostgreSQL to billions of rows, to writing open-source tools used millions of times over. These days I help teams integrate large language models, vector databases, and intelligent automation into production systems through ReinventONE.

This blog is where I write up the engineering lessons in long form. A few numbers that add up:

Find me on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn — or schedule a chat.

Want to hire me? Take a look at my resume.

The longer story — if you're still here :)

// right now

Right now, I'm building with AI — not talking about it at conferences, not writing thought pieces about prompt engineering, but shipping production systems that wire large language models, vector databases, and intelligent automation into applications that handle real traffic. Through ReinventONE, I consult, teach, and deploy. On the side, I build things like Inquirex — because open source is a habit I picked up decades ago and never kicked.

// the fires

Before the AI wave, there were the fires. At Fossa, I caught a PostgreSQL cluster creeping toward 27 terabytes of transaction-ID wraparound — a silent, invisible catastrophe that would have bricked the entire database — and stopped it cold. At Wanelo, I took a Ruby application from 3,000 requests per minute to 300,000, scaling a social-shopping platform through the kind of traffic that turns most Rails apps into smoking craters.

The open-source footprint is almost absurd: 200 million+ RubyGems downloads, 200+ public GitHub repositories, tools running silently inside systems whose operators will never know my name.

// origins

Rewind further and you find a kid in Kharkiv, Ukraine, winning math olympiads while the Soviet Union disintegrated around him. I taught myself C from whatever I could get my hands on, wrote production code before most engineers had heard of Linux, and spent the next thirty years proving that a self-taught mathematician with stubbornness and a terminal window can outbuild entire teams.

// beyond the terminal

But software has never been the whole story. I've been running whitewater rivers in a plastic kayak since I was thirteen. I play piano, guitar, and drums — all at what I diplomatically call an amateur level. My ex-wife and I produced two trip-hop and downtempo albums under the name PolyGroovers, available on every streaming platform worth opening.

// what matters most

And then there's the thing no algorithm can touch. My daughter — one year old, absurdly adorable, and the brightest point in a life that has seen its share of darkness. I was born in Kharkiv, a city now under daily Russian bombardment. I lost family in the October 7th Hamas attack. The world I worry about is not abstract — it's personal, and it's on fire.