TL;DR: I am a software engineer at Google, born in Ukraine, raised in Moscow, and based in Switzerland since I was 25. I’m a husband and a proud dad to a very cute daughter. I love coffee, good food, and fine cocktails. My technical interests center on LLM post-training (search and factuality), small language model (SLM) fine-tuning, transfer learning, distillation, and ranking/recommendation systems.

Hi, let me introduce myself.

My name is Dmitry, I was born in Ukraine and raised by a single mother. We later moved to Moscow, where I grew up and studied. Money was tight, and I vividly remember my mom struggling to provide for the two of us in a foreign country without a support network. Watching her persevere shaped my character deeply.

I studied IT at Moscow Aviation University, where I discovered my passion for Machine Learning. I had to self-studied everything related to it myleft though (thank you Andrew Ng and Christopher Bishop), because we didn’t have this subject back in the days. My career started in ML consulting, followed by a role at Yandex, truly felt like that was a company of my dreams. However, I always wanted to live abroad, so when there was an opportunity to join Google in Switzerland, I didn’t even think.

Looking back, I consider myself exceptionally fortunate. Across every company I’ve worked for, I’ve been lucky enough to make lifelong friends.

And in general I trully consider myself a lucky person.

I’m naturally introverted, but I actively work on stepping out of my comfort zone to be more open and connected with others.

I enjoy good coffee, great food, and well-crafted cocktails. I am not sure that eating / drinking coctails can be called a hobby in a traditional way, but it’s easily one of my favorite ways to spend time.

Outside of work I usually split my free time between:

• Spending time with my wife, daughter, family and friends
• Traveling
• Going to the gym, playing tennis, hiking, or skiing
• Working on personal projects (e.g. installing a Gaggiuino, doing custom woodworking, or building software projects like Swiss Pension Calculator)
• Repairing things around the house (often I feel emotionally attached to stuff I own and don’t like getting rid of it)
• Trying to stay up to date in work related topics (reading technical papers, filling gaps in my knowledge)
• Taking care of my houseplants
• Organizing everything (I love when things are in order, not obsessed though)

I am also actively learning German to be able to better integrate in Switzerland (it’s going very slowly, because I am naturally talanted in being bad at learning new languages).

I have a deep appreciation for great engineering and thoughtful design.

My area of expertise: LLM post-training focused on everything related to search and factuality; fine-tuning SLM; ranking, classification and RecSys.

My main goal in life is to find peace. I have defined certain values for myself and inspired by PERMA-V model trying to find balance in my life.