Ilia Bukin
London, UK
I build the whole thing — product, API, data platform, deployment. Currently running digital operations and engineering at a retail business, and co-founding an AI studio on the side.
About
I'm a full-stack engineer in London. I own delivery end to end — product UI, APIs, data platforms, and the infrastructure underneath — most recently as the sole engineer building a retail company's analytics platform from scratch. I like the messy middle of a business: working out what people actually need, then shipping the smallest thing that answers it.
London, UK
Experience
Digital Operations Manager — Purebaby
Apr 2025 – Present · London, UK
End-to-end delivery ownership as the only engineer embedded in a retail business — from warehouse to the app people use every day.
- Sole engineer for the business: gathered requirements from Planning, Sales, and Marketing, then designed, shipped, and now run everything in production.
- Built the company's data platform end to end — orchestrated ingestion from 9+ source systems, 100+ transformation models, and an 81-cube semantic layer that is now the single source of truth for reporting.
- Built RetailFlow, the internal Next.js platform on top of it: real-time dashboards, project management, and team chat, with MFA, SSO, and page-level RBAC that passed a third-party security audit.
- Migrated the warehouse from Snowflake to self-hosted ClickHouse, cutting running costs by roughly 90%.
- Shipped an assistant and an MCP server over the semantic layer so any team can query live company data in natural language.
Co-Founder & Full Stack Engineer — LyraGen
Feb 2026 – Present · Remote
Building and selling software for regulated industries — client scoping, architecture, and shipping, in a two-person team.
- Co-founded the studio and shipped Lyramed, a clinical decision-support product: a Next.js app in front of a FastAPI service, secured with JWT auth, with CI/CD and tests across all three services.
- Designed the multi-agent pipeline — a triage agent routing to pharmacology, lab analysis, and imaging specialists — behind a 5-layer safety pipeline screening every response.
- Automated the GDPR data lifecycle, including DSAR deletion across the app, agent state, and object storage via the outbox pattern.
- Scoped requirements directly with non-technical clients in a regulated industry and translated domain rules into production systems.
Research Assistant — Queen Mary University of London
Sep 2022 – Nov 2024 · London, UK
Data collection and machine-learning research alongside my degrees, ending in a published paper.
- Built a scraping pipeline that extracted 100,000+ app-store reviews and fine-tuned a text classifier on them, improving accuracy by 15%.
- Authored a paper on hybrid retrieval, combining knowledge-graph and vector search, and benchmarked four pipelines against a shared evaluation framework.
Education
MSc Computer Science — DistinctionQueen Mary University of London
Sep 2023 – Sep 2024
BSc (Hons) Business with LawQueen Mary University of London
Sep 2019 – Jun 2022
Stack
Languages
Frontend
Backend
Data
AI / agents
Cloud & DevOps
Featured projects
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Open to interesting work and happy to talk shop — drop me a line.