Featured on @tellsef — From Hackathons to Senior AI Engineer
Featured in a media post by @tellsef covering the journey from school hackathons to Senior AI Engineer — presenting to government leaders, building Kandinsky and X-FLUX, and founding an AI agency.
Got featured by @tellsef in a career spotlight covering my journey in AI.
The story they told
From school hackathons to Senior AI Engineer in 1.5 years.
The post covers five chapters of my career:
1. The beginning
Got into machine learning in 10th grade in Kaspiysk, Dagestan. Won about 10 competitions including NTO and silver in a Google Kaggle challenge. Became the absolute winner of AIIJC — Russia’s largest AI competition — and presented the project to government leaders on national television.
2. Corporate experience & open source
- SberAI: Co-authored Kandinsky 2.2, 3.0, 3.1 — Russia’s flagship generative AI models. Built an auto-presentation system using GigaChat + Kandinsky.
- XLabs AI (Senior ML Engineer): Built the X-FLUX ecosystem — 4,000+ stars on GitHub, nearly 1 million downloads on HuggingFace.
3. Social impact
AI for cultural preservation: the Lezgin language project. Not just coding for corporations — building meaningful social projects. Together with 1,000+ volunteers, we launched a translator, trained a TTS model, and wrote a Telegram bot for data collection. Everything open-source.
4. Going international
Founded an AI agency with clients from Moscow, Dubai, and London — from industrial enterprises to content farms. A subscriber from Twitter (X) invited us to an exclusive business club, where expertise and hunger for results sealed the deal.
5. The takeaway
Technical hunger + real ROI beats empty AI hype. Every day with burning eyes into new challenges.