About
AI & Data Engineer
I build large-scale data and machine learning systems, with a recent focus on GenAI, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI. Over the last few years I've deployed production LLM applications on AWS, designed multi-agent workflows, and shipped data infrastructure that processes petabyte-scale datasets in healthcare, ad-tech, and e-commerce.
I care most about the unglamorous parts of real-world AI — evaluation, reliability, cost, and what happens when the model confidently gets it wrong.
What I work on
- Agentic AI: multi-agent orchestration (LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, Pydantic AI, Bedrock AgentCore), tool-use design, failure-mode handling, human-in-the-loop.
- LLMs & RAG: Anthropic, OpenAI, Llama, Mistral; hybrid retrieval (OpenSearch, pgvector); guardrails, grounding, ranking; local inference with Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM.
- Evals & reliability: LangSmith, LLM-as-judge, golden datasets, CI/CD eval gating.
- MCP: internal Model Context Protocol servers with auth, scoped tools, streaming, and schema validation.
- Platform: Python (FastAPI, async), AWS (Bedrock, HealthOmics, Lambda, Step Functions, Redshift, S3, DynamoDB), Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes.
Background
I've spent the last several years building production GenAI systems — large-scale RAG pipelines for clinical data, MCP servers for text-to-SQL flows, multi-agent workflows, and the eval infrastructure around them. Earlier work was in ML and data engineering at Gazelle AI, SSENSE, Bandsintown, and Wajam, and I taught a Big Data course at Concordia University.
PhD in Physics (All But Defence) from the University at Albany, SUNY — dissertation combined stochastic Liouville equation modeling for NMR with supervised machine learning on Raman spectroscopy data.
Publications
- Earl K., Kazakov O. (2020). The Spin Echo, Entropy, and Experimental Design. Proceedings, 33(1), 34. doi
- Ryzhikova E., Sikirzhytski V., Kazakov O., Halamkova L., Quinn J., Zimmerman E.A., Lednev I.K. (2016). Raman spectroscopy of Cerebrospinal Fluid for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Journal of Biophotonics.
- Ryzhikova E., Kazakov O., Halamkova L., Celmins D., Malone P., Molho E., Zimmerman E.A., Lednev I.K. (2015). Raman spectroscopy of blood serum for Alzheimer's disease diagnostics: specificity relative to other types of dementia. Journal of Biophotonics, 8(7), 584–596. doi
- Lednev I.K., Ryzhikova E., Kazakov O., Halamkova L., Celmins D., Malone P., Molho E., Zimmerman E.A. (2014). Raman Spectroscopy of Blood for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnostics. Annals of Neurology, 76, 94.