Ilia Bukin
London, UK
I build the whole thing: product, API, data platform, deployment. Right now that's engineering and digital operations at a retail business, plus an AI studio I co-founded.
About
Most recently I was the sole engineer building a retail company's analytics platform from scratch. I like the messy middle of a business: working out what people actually need, then shipping the smallest thing that answers it.
Experience
Digital Operations Manager · Purebaby
Apr 2025 – Present · London, UK
End-to-end delivery ownership as the only engineer embedded in a retail business, from warehouse to the app people use every day.
- Gathered requirements from Planning, Sales, and Marketing, then designed, shipped, and now run everything in production.
- Built the company's data platform end to end, orchestrating ingestion from 9+ source systems, 100+ transformation models, and an 81-cube semantic layer that is now the single source of truth for reporting.
- Built RetailFlow, the internal Next.js platform on top of it: real-time dashboards, project management, and team chat, with MFA, SSO, and page-level RBAC that passed a third-party security audit.
- Migrated the warehouse from Snowflake to self-hosted ClickHouse, cutting running costs by roughly 90%.
- Shipped an assistant and an MCP server over the semantic layer so any team can query live company data in natural language.
Co-Founder & Full Stack Engineer · LyraGen
Feb 2026 – Present · Remote
Building and selling software for regulated industries, covering client scoping, architecture, and shipping in a two-person team.
- Co-founded the studio and shipped Lyramed, a clinical decision-support product: a Next.js app in front of a FastAPI service, secured with JWT auth, with CI/CD and tests across all three services.
- Designed the multi-agent pipeline: a triage agent routing to pharmacology, lab analysis, and imaging specialists, behind a 5-layer safety pipeline screening every response.
- Automated the GDPR data lifecycle, including DSAR deletion across the app, agent state, and object storage via the outbox pattern.
- Scoped requirements directly with non-technical clients in a regulated industry and translated domain rules into production systems.
Research Assistant · Queen Mary University of London
Sep 2022 – Nov 2024 · London, UK
Data collection and machine-learning research alongside my degrees, ending in a published paper.
- Built a scraping pipeline that extracted 100,000+ app-store reviews and fine-tuned a text classifier on them, improving accuracy by 15%.
- Authored a paper on hybrid retrieval, combining knowledge-graph and vector search, and benchmarked four pipelines against a shared evaluation framework.
Education
MSc Computer Science · DistinctionQueen Mary University of London
Sep 2023 – Sep 2024
BSc (Hons) Business with LawQueen Mary University of London
Sep 2019 – Jun 2022
Stack
Languages
Frontend
Backend
Data
AI & agents
Cloud & DevOps
Featured projects
View allLyramed
A 9-agent clinical AI system on the LangGraph swarm pattern, wrapped in a 5-layer safety pipeline.MoveScout
A solo-built UK property search engine aggregating OnTheMarket, Rightmove, and Zoopla with geospatial search over PostGIS.RetailFlow
Purebaby's company-wide analytics and operations platform, the app the data platform and MCP server plug into.
Latest posts
View allrtk: the Rust "token killer" that compresses agent shell output
rtk is a Rust CLI proxy that compresses the shell output coding agents read. It can cut up to 90% of the bash output, and its own docs are refreshingly honest about why that is not the same as a 90% cheaper bill.litelm: LiteLLM's routing core in ~2,900 lines and two dependencies
litelm rebuilds LiteLLM's model-routing and message-translation core in ~2,900 lines with two dependencies, no proxy, and no Router class.context-mode: the MCP server that keeps raw tool output out of your agent's context window
A look at context-mode, the trending open-source MCP server that sandboxes tool output to keep raw bytes out of your agent's context window.
Contact
Open to engineering roles and to building things with people who have a problem worth solving. Email is the fastest way to reach me.