aleksey.io
Aleksey Smolenchuk

Aleksey Smolenchuk

Software engineer · San Francisco

17 years of experience building web applications, applied AI, developer tools, and infrastructure at early-stage startups and global technology companies.


OpenAI

2026 –
Member of Technical StaffSan Francisco
  • Prism: Engineering lead across nearly all of Prism (prism.openai.com), owning product and platform architecture end to end.
  • Codex: Building OpenAI's agentic coding platform across product and core infrastructure.

Crixet

2025 –
Founding EngineerSan Francisco
  • Founding engineer of a real-time collaborative LaTeX editor; acquired by OpenAI (2025).
  • Led a rearchitecture of the backend, CRDT-based sync engine, and sandboxed compilation infrastructure, cutting infrastructure costs by 92% through compute and pipeline optimization.
  • Owned product features and infrastructure end to end, sustaining rapid user growth through launch and acquisition.

Netflix

2023 – 2025
Software EngineerSan Francisco
  • Built and operated world-scale Node.js services serving critical data to millions under strict latency and uptime SLAs.
  • Architected developer-platform components and CI/CD that measurably improved build and deploy velocity across engineering.
  • Drove software supply-chain security across the JavaScript platform.

Opendoor

2019 – 2023
Software EngineerSan Francisco
  • Owned and scaled a mission-critical cross-org Node.js GraphQL gateway serving critical production traffic at 99.99% reliability.
  • Established engineering-platform standards, automation pipelines, and shared tooling adopted org-wide.

Uber

2014 – 2019
Software EngineerSan Francisco
  • Technical leader for the internal developer platform: frontend frameworks (JavaScript, Node.js) powering hundreds of web apps company-wide.
  • Launched both major customer-facing product features as well as developer experience + internal tools and platforms at scale.
  • Engineering Manager (2017 – 2018): Led a team delivering developer-productivity processes and systems.

Branding Brand

2012 – 2014
Software EngineerPittsburgh
  • Architect lead on mobile e-commerce platforms for world-leading retailers.

Ansaldo STS (Hitachi Group)

2010 – 2012
Embedded Software EngineerPittsburgh
  • Built Linux systems- and kernel-level, safety-critical embedded software for train-control systems.

Education

University of Pittsburgh2007–2010

B.S. in Computer Science

Skills & languages

Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Previously used: Go, Rust, Lua, C, C++

AI & ML: LLMs, fine-tuning / post-training (HF stack, LoRA/PEFT), agentic systems, RAG, evaluation, prompt engineering

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, IaaS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Cloud networking, supply-chain security, GraphQL, gRPC, monorepos, CI/CD pipelines, observability, operation & scaling

Frontend: React, Next.js, Node.js, a11y, i18n, browser APIs, web performance, web security

Product & Systems: Product engineering & design, developer platforms, rapid prototyping; Linux (kernel/systems-level), embedded & safety-critical software; high-QPS microservices, distributed systems

Spoken languages: English (native), Russian (native), Belarusian

A few personal projects

All on GitHub

simple-llm-finetuner

A simple interface for fine-tuning language models.

2,053stars

llavavision

A “Be My Eyes” web app using a local vision-language model.

496stars

wasm-gpt

A browser-based chatbot built with ggml and WebAssembly. Runs locally, without API keys or a backend.

273stars

chrome-mcp

Let LLM agents operate Chrome without taking screenshots.

49stars

yapyap

Fast, simple push-to-talk dictation.

47stars