Independent software engineering for complex products
I am Ihar Ivaniuk, an independent software engineering consultant based in Gdańsk. I help startups and established companies design, build, modernize, and scale production software — from architecture and product engineering to AI integrations, LLM applications, and automation that has to survive real traffic. I work as a senior engineer and architect, not as a staffed outsourcing bench.
Who I work with
- Founders, CTOs, and heads of engineering who need a principal-level partner on a high-risk path.
- Product companies and scale-ups whose internal team is strong but thin on architecture, AI, or modernization.
- SMEs and digital agencies that need boutique engineering instead of a large vendor team.
- Teams putting a model into an existing product, or moving a live platform without switching it off.
Why this shape of engagement
- Nine-plus years shipping web platforms, AI-backed products, and content systems — including enterprise CMS migrations and LLM benchmarking.
- End-to-end ownership: discovery, architecture, implementation, CI/CD, and production reliability.
- A bias toward the least complex path that survives production. Deterministic logic stays the default; models enter where ambiguity earns the cost.
- Direct communication with executives and engineering leadership. I will tell you when not to build.
Problems I am hired to close
- The implementation path is still a set of competing guesses.
- AI has to live inside a workflow, with contracts and a fallback — not as a demo chat.
- A live platform needs modernization in stages.
- Operations are the bottleneck, and the process must survive bad input and retries.
- Leadership needs an independent architecture or technical reading before a large spend.
How we can work
- Software engineering consulting
Senior engineering judgement for companies that need a principal-level partner, not a staffed agency team.
- Custom software development
Product engineering for teams that need a senior builder, not a multi-layer outsourcing chain.
- Software architecture
System design for live products: what should exist, where the boundaries sit, and how the system fails.
- AI integration
Put a model inside an existing workflow, with contracts and a way out — not beside the product as a chatbot.
- AI automation
Remove the manual bottleneck in a live operation: rules first, models only where the input is messy.
- AI agents
Tool-using agents for bounded workflows, with permissions and evals — not an autonomous employee.
Selected projects
- Genie Platforms
Senior Software Engineer · AI Platform
Conversational AI platform for sales, RevOps, and GTM — an AI SDR inside existing revenue workflows.
- Server-side microservice architecture
- Kafka with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis
- Partner APIs on Kubernetes / AWS
- TIVA
Full-stack Developer · AI Platform
Voice and text retrieval platform (TIVA Data / Knowledge Base) that reaches data regardless of source.
- Client and server application layers
- RPC paths profiled under load
- Retrieval over PostgreSQL and MongoDB
- Kwizie
Full-stack Developer · AI / EdTech
EdTech platform that turns video and other unstructured content into quizzes, answers, and metadata.
- Client and server architecture (React / NestJS)
- Nested product UI, APIs, and PostgreSQL
- Video and content → quizzes and metadata
Notes on the work
- When to add an LLM to an existing product — and when you should not
A decision framework for integrating a large language model into an existing product, written for engineering and product leaders who have to live with the result.
- How to modernize a live content platform without switching it off
A practical method for migrating a live content or commerce platform onto a current headless stack without a big-bang cut-over.
- A practical software architecture review framework
The dimensions I use when reviewing a production architecture, aimed at a decision rather than a diagram.