About
1990
Cheboksary, Russia
I was born and raised in Cheboksary, a city on the Volga River about 400 miles east of Moscow. Growing up, I spent much of my time studying and playing the piano. Music became a big part of my life - I played in one rock band with friends and another with my dad. Looking back, those years taught me the value of discipline, persistence, and the rewards that come from steady practice.
2008
United World College
At seventeen, I left home to attend the United World College in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Living at a boarding school alongside students from dozens of countries was the first time I realized just how different people’s backgrounds, perspectives, and life stories could be. It pushed me well outside my comfort zone and remains one of the most formative experiences of my life.
2010–2019
Bucknell University & Johns Hopkins University
I came to the United States in 2010 to attend Bucknell University, where I studied Civil Engineering. During my time there, I developed an interest in research, which led me to pursue a PhD at Johns Hopkins University. My doctoral work focused on topology optimization - the science of designing structures through mathematical optimization. Along the way, I served as Chair of the Graduate Student Government, taught courses in Design and Additive Manufacturing, published academic research, and spent countless hours writing code to solve engineering problems.
As much as I loved engineering, I found myself increasingly curious about a different set of questions. Why do companies build the products they do? How do they decide which markets to enter? How do technical ideas become real businesses? I realized there was an entire business world beyond engineering that I knew almost nothing about, and I wanted to understand it. That curiosity led me to the Boston Consulting Group.
2020
Boston Consulting Group
Over the next six years at BCG, I worked with senior leaders to shape business strategies, quantify growth opportunities, and design implementation roadmaps for strategic and technology initiatives. The problems varied widely - from distributing vaccines during COVID-19 and reducing fare evasion in a state transit system to improving predictive maintenance offerings and identifying high-value AI opportunities within a manufacturing organization - but the common thread was learning how to navigate ambiguity, quickly understand unfamiliar industries, and help Fortune 500 and public sector leaders navigate uncertainty.
As my work increasingly centered around digital transformation and AI, I found myself drawn back toward building. I wanted to go beyond advising organizations on how to adopt AI and experience what it meant to build an AI product from scratch - working directly with customers, writing code, shipping features, and seeing ideas become reality. In 2025, I left BCG to co-found Sentient AI.
2025
Sentient AI
As Sentient’s CTO, I built an enterprise AI platform designed to help teams create executive presentations faster. Building the company became a crash course in product development, modern software engineering, cloud infrastructure, security, and AI systems design as we took the product from a blank page to enterprise pilots. It brought together everything I’d done before - engineering, business, and software - in a way no previous role had.
Now
Today
I’m building projects, learning new things, traveling, and following my curiosity. This website is a collection of some of those projects, along with the occasional idea that’s interesting enough to write down.
