Boris Petrov
Senior product engineer,
building with AI
Amazon·
Google→independent2026 · Moving into applied AI
Building-products sales agency
Oct 2026Spec scanner, a small proof of concept
- A web app that scans 1,000+ page construction specs for everything the agency's product lines could bid on, citing the page and the specified manufacturer for each find
- Each scan is a Claude Code session that plans its own reading of the spec (e.g. splitting it across parallel sub-agents) and saves its results through the app's MCP tools in a fixed format
Bitquark
Aug-Oct 2026Pre-launch macOS productivity app
- Audited the app's UX with the founder, prototyped several options for each design question, and laid out the trade-offs
- Built the chosen designs in Flutter/Dart, a stack new to me, including search across mail and notes and macOS window focus behavior
- Directed coding agents throughout and owned the correctness of the code
Play Jumbo
Jun-Aug 2026Pre-launch live sports trivia and prediction app
- Prototyped LLM generation of trivia and prediction questions during live games
- Prototyped a replay simulator that ran a recorded Super Bowl through the generator play by play, to surface the first failure modes (e.g. 29% near-duplicate mini-games in one run)
- Wrote up the failure modes, costs, and data needed, and handed it all to the in-house engineers
AI engineering bootcamp, SwirlAI
Jun-Aug 2026Eight-week course taught by Aurimas Griciūnas
- Hybrid RAG (dense + BM25, reranking) with retrieval evals, then a LangGraph agent with MCP tools
- Capstone: a hand-labeling tool for LLM-generated questions, and a test of whether an LLM judge could replace the labels
Selected product engineering work
Radical Tempo
15 monthsAI-augmented video publishing platform
- Second engineer hired — zero to early-access launch
- Multi-phase pipeline state: transcoding, AI generation, rendering, each with its own progress and failure modes
- Layered data fetching: server components, React Query caching, Supabase Realtime
- Cross-platform publish form: one view serving 8 platform types with per-platform validation and field constraints
- Design collaboration on AI-augmented workflows with few established patterns
California Pizza Kitchen
22 monthsRestaurant chain website and ordering system
- Led team of 3 across frontend, CMS, and backend
- Inherited and stabilized a codebase left broken by the previous agency
- SEO boost via programmatically generated location pages (100+) and CMS-powered menu pages
- System of smart redirects/deep-links to ordering platform, preserving loyalty session
- 25% homepage load time reduction; CMS storage and bandwidth optimization
- WCAG accessibility and GDPR/CCPA cookie compliance
Navii
1 monthAI assistant for career development
- Brought on for urgent stabilization of agent-built frontend weeks before launch
- Issues with React component lifecycle, global state management, caching
- Audited, advised, then implemented highest-impact fixes under tight deadline
- Laid guardrails for post-launch changes
Also worked with
Lasso Labs
Rising Stars AI
SpeakEasy
Engineered Tax Services
Subcity
Mirror
Some client work is under NDA or behind logins.
When teams bring me in
Inflection point
Approaching a launch, fundraise, or growth spike and need extra muscle to get it over the line.
Expertise gap
Need a senior engineer but not sure it's a full-time role – or not sure yet how long the need lasts.
Parallel workstream
Core team is heads-down on roadmap while a new initiative (experimental, time-sensitive) needs to progress.
Testimonials
“He brought a level of craft to everything he built… had a strong partnership with our designer, which made a huge difference in what we were able to ship… reliable as hell when it comes to hitting deadlines.”
Ravi Kolluri
Cofounder & CTO, Radical Tempo
“Boris’s super power is that he looks beyond the technical and grasps the business objective… It’s rare to find a technologist who can push and pull at a business level to deliver results in the form of revenue.”
David Harris
Director of Ecommerce and Digital Marketing, California Pizza Kitchen
“He always goes above and beyond to assess the clients’ needs and flag any potential roadblocks early on… Boris excels as a team lead and manager, ensuring that the team is well-equipped for any project and capable of overcoming any challenge.”
Alexz Graves
Sr. Creative Producer, Planetary
“…a great problem solver… He presents his way as an option to consider and seeks input from others on pros and cons… He spends time trying to understand the problem and having empathy for the user.”
Ajoy Bhambani
Founder, Rising Stars AI
“I’ve worked with Boris on multiple occasions with different budget, timing, and expertise requirements, and every time, Boris has been able to deliver high quality work… His communication skills regarding estimates, technical tradeoffs, and user requirements are top notch.”
Molly Nacey
Fractional CTO/CPO
“…holds a very high bar for quality… has earned trust with the team as someone who can work independently with PMs, UX and TPMs to figure out the goals, requirements, risks and schedule for a project and then successfully execute.”
Chris Bee
Engineering Manager, ex-Amazon/Zillow/Uber