Ihar Ivaniuk – independent software engineer and AI consultant

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 a senior independent engineer 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.

All services · Expertise

Selected projects

• Synopsys

  LLM evaluation platform · Senior Frontend Developer · Generative AI

  Enterprise product UI at Synopsys for benchmarking and comparing large language models, including trial-inference surfaces for Generative AI experiments.

  • Reusable Next.js UI for model comparison and trial inference
  • Shared frontend standards on an existing product team
  • TypeScript delivery path with Docker in the environment
• IMF

  Sitecore XM Cloud migration · Senior Software Engineer · Platform Migration

  Headless reimplementation of a legacy Sitecore 9.2 site for the International Monetary Fund on Sitecore XM Cloud, with a Next.js frontend over GraphQL.

  • Sitecore 9.2 → XM Cloud with a headless Next.js front
  • GraphQL as the CMS contract
  • Content and component behaviour kept consistent through cutover
• Diageo

  Contentful platform migration · Senior Software Engineer · CMS Migration

  Repeatable migration of structured content from legacy Umbraco and Magento systems into Contentful for Diageo, with the public frontend hosted on Vercel.

  • Umbraco and Magento → Contentful as the editorial system of record
  • Automated, repeatable Node.js migration jobs
  • Content models reshaped for editorial use, not a one-off dump

Projects

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.