Illya Bakurov

Primary hands-on full-stack engineer across client applications, backend services, integrations, data, reliability, and cloud delivery.

• Multi-surface product: built and launched Stella Foster across phone, SMS, web, native Apple apps, and Slack, reaching 40,000+ users.
• Web and native clients: built React and TypeScript customer experiences and an operations console for live conversations, tool calls, execution state, production traces, failures, and human handoffs. Built Swift and SwiftUI clients for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, plus a React Native messaging client for iOS and Android with CallKit and an Apple Watch extension.
• Backend and developer platform: built Stella's Node.js and Express backend on Google Cloud and Firestore, then migrated it to TypeScript. Built Outside Agent using tRPC, Zod, event-sourced PostgreSQL, Drizzle, pgvector, and MCP tooling for web, SMS, voice, and email.
• Memory and retrieval: built identity, preference, and working-memory tiers in Firestore with AI-estimated lifetimes for temporary facts and conflict-aware updates. Stored Gemini embeddings for conversation history and combined cosine-similarity retrieval with keyword search.
• Integrations and real-time voice: connected 15+ platforms across communications, payments, commerce, and transportation, including Twilio Voice and SMS, Stripe, Twilio Pay, Amazon, Uber Health, Slack, Google, and OpenAI. Re-platformed voice from Deepgram and ElevenLabs to OpenAI Realtime and then Gemini Live behind a provider interface supporting interruption and multilingual switching.
• Durable commerce: replaced contending jobs with one durable Temporal workflow per conversation. Built a stored-value ledger with Firebase and Firestore transactions, migrated it to PostgreSQL for Outside Agent, and made Stripe and Twilio Pay actions idempotent with spend controls, auditable state, and two-step voice confirmation.
• Cloud delivery, quality, and observability: operated Docker services on Google Cloud Run and Cloud SQL with Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Scheduler, GitHub Actions, Cloud Deploy, and Terraform. Built 1,620+ Promptfoo and Langfuse evaluation and red-team cases, instrumented behavior with PostHog, and gated releases with automated tests and Temporal workflow replay.

• Full-stack delivery: led iOS, Android, and web delivery for a music platform; built the native iOS consumer app and React and Node.js artist platform hands-on, and coordinated the external Android team to keep features and releases aligned.
• Creator and content tooling: built a React and Node.js console for managing media, artwork, platform presence, content workflows, and engagement analytics, with ShazamKit audio recognition.
• Search and team growth: prototyped machine-learning-assisted search and media synchronization, moved engineering in-house, helped hire engineers, and mentored engineering interns.

Designed and built fully functional product prototypes. Production engineers wrote the shipping code, and I partnered with them through launch and measurement.

• Designed and built the working Objective-C prototype for the Preview Filter Carousel, used by 64M people daily, then partnered through launch. Experiments increased both filter impressions and sends across iOS and Android.
• Built functional prototypes for Voice Over, Auto-Caption, Text-to-Speech, Crop, Stickers, Lens Explorer, Lens Carousel, and editing flows using Swift, Objective-C, UIKit, Figma, Origami, and ProtoPie.
• Used product analytics, anonymized logs, controlled experiments, and user research to refine creation, engagement, and discovery flows before production investment.
• Led and mentored three design engineers while partnering with product, design, research, data science, and engineering on product behavior, instrumentation, technical tradeoffs, and launch decisions.

• Led Objective-C and Swift development for wealth-management applications serving 25,000+ daily users under bank-grade availability, security, privacy, and compliance controls.
• Worked with product, design, security, compliance, and executives across RBC, City National Bank, and IBM to translate financial workflows into reliable mobile experiences and bring the City National Bank application in-house.
• Both products won Best Private Bank for Digital Client Communication in North America at the inaugural Global Wealth Tech Awards.

• Built and led development across 20+ consumer iOS and web products spanning social networks, audiobooks, video editing, utilities, and games.
• The largest product reached 250K+ monthly active users, and the most profitable reached $20K+ per month.
• Built Spotlight, which was acquired by Snap and became a core Snapchat feature.

• Wrote ShiVa and Lua gameplay systems for Dragon Sim Online, a live multiplayer title that won Google's AdMob Student App Challenge and passed 500K+ downloads.