Senior Technical Program Manager · AI-Native Platforms

I connect systems
that don't talk
to each other.

Technical, human, or both. 10+ years shipping complex programs across AI/ML, IoT, and hardware. This year it's Kestrel, a production AI platform I ship and operate solo, with evals in CI.

Vitalik Garan Frankfurt, Germany LinkedIn GitHub Email

The proof

Three artifacts, written for a 60-second read each. Numbers first, story second. Everything here is checkable against the repos.

Kestrel: an operated AI system

Solo-built production job-market platform. Scoring filter measured at 79.1% recall / 53.1% precision on a 277-item hand-labelled benchmark, evals in CI, AI cost per run cut $6.51 to $0.84. Plus an annotated repo tour.

Read the case study →

Ring radar: a senior-judgment one-pager

A radar camera from sensor research to 800k-2M units shipped. 10+ teams, 5 countries, 4 years. And the two calls that mattered more than any launch: a full platform rollback and a termination.

Read the one-pager →

Parallel invention: Kestrel vs career-ops

Two people built the same idea, published four days apart, without knowing of each other. Theirs has 62,000+ stars. Mine has 5, and measured evals. A teardown of what actually differed.

Read the teardown →

The short version

My brain works like a browser with 40 tabs open. I know a lot about a lot of things, and I'm not deep in any single one. That used to feel like a weakness. It isn't. It's the whole point of me.

What I actually do is take a service here, an integration there, a Slack feature nobody noticed, a Jira hook that no one bothered to set up, and make them talk to each other. It's not work. It's exploration.

Same with people. I connect teams and people and make them do their best work -- whether I'm "alone" in the hierarchy, like TPMs sometimes are, or part of a project or a team. What most needs connection, support, and direction is people, and the teams those people make up. My focus is people over tools or names.

People above tools. Roads above walls.

I function as a one-man army when I have to. Ownership means making things happen. But I'm only as good as the team, and I stand on behalf of the team and our decisions. The frontier work I did myself, I could only do thanks to the people who supported me: a team always on hand with expertise, kindness, thoughtful ideas, partnership.

Things I've shipped

Senior Technical Program Manager who builds with AI, not just manages it.

Independent Feb 2026 · present
Builder & Operator, Kestrel

A deliberate choice after Wolt: go deep into the 2026 multi-agent AI stack instead of watching it from a deck. Working alone for half a year, I got promoted to Builder, Product Manager, QA, CFO, and CTO of myself. Kestrel is the AI job-search platform I run on myself: FastAPI + React, ten AI providers behind one interface, 4,600+ tests, on PyPI under AGPL. Open source in public.

  • Kestrel: scoring filter at 79.1% recall / 53.1% precision on a 277-item hand-labelled benchmark; AI cost per run cut $6.51 to $0.84.
  • screenpipe: 24 merged upstream PRs + a dev/test harness I dogfood 24/7 -- work that led to a direct offer from the founder.
  • More: web-agent-comparison, llm-safe-haven, awesome-llm-token-optimization, chronoclaude.
evals in CI · $6.51 → $0.84 per run
Wolt (DoorDash) Oct 2025 · Feb 2026
Technical Program Manager

Fed every API, transcript, doc, and private chat into an LLM system until it knew more about the program than any single person. 6 AI models, 4 enterprise APIs, one second brain that could synthesize status across the entire org in a single prompt. Volunteered to build it. Still love it.

  • Joined to build the AI-augmented program function from scratch, post-M&A, with no established tooling culture.
  • Managed the Salesforce CRM transformation across product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
6 AI + 4 APIs → 1 second brain
Amazon · Alexa AGI 2022 · 2025
TPM, ML & Speech Recognition

Ran continuous ASR training pipelines across French and Italian locales. Got researchers who want to experiment and engineers who need to ship into working alignment across 3 continents. Cut release SLA from multi-day to 1 business day.

  • Continuous ASR training and deployment across French and Italian locales -- research in Aachen and Bangalore, engineering in Seattle.
  • Drove an early LLM integration initiative alongside the ASR work, during the inflection year for large language models.
3 continents, 1-day SLA
Amazon · Ring 2018 · 2022
TPM, Sensor Research & Hardware R&D

Led Ring Ultra radar camera from sensor research to 800k-2M units shipped. 10+ teams, 5 countries, 4 years. ML, hardware, firmware, and software simultaneously. Shipped Motion Settings 2.0 to 40M+ devices. Managed full platform rollback after an accidental global deploy -- the response was the measure. The one-pager has the two hard calls.

  • Motion Settings 2.0 to 40M+ devices in controlled 1M/day waves; Person Detection from 30% to 46% on deployed hardware.
  • ANVIL compliance overhaul: 25 independently certified services, zero downtime, 5 certifications 30 weeks early.
  • Portfolio of 7 products fusing ML, hardware, firmware, and software.
800k-2M units shipped
CloudMade 2017 · 2018
Fleet & Field Program Manager

Built 5 modded VW demo cars running the company's stack natively. Reverse-engineered the CANBUS, pulled real sensor data. 200+ live demo drives. Sales engagement up 5x. Several $1M+ contracts directly attributed.

  • Cut demo prep from 1 month to 1 week by integrating the field team directly with R&D.
5x sales engagement

The paper version, with every date and bullet: the full CV as a page (print-friendly).

Things I believe

People above tools, roads above walls.

Reason above frameworks.

Scrum, sprints, name-drops: it all gets incubated first.

Plus times minus is minus. Good work for an evil project is still evil.

And if you did the work: don't hide behind names, teams, titles, tickets, or HR. Take your share, even a minor one, and own it. Make up for it now or later, don't forget.

A person is a process.

Results are for tasks; teams are processes. Telling them apart is the actual job.

The slide between scales.

The map is not the territory, and a one-to-one map is no longer a map. Simple enough to reason with, dense enough to be true.

I come from black and white. I work in fifty million shades of gray.

You don't need fifty million ways to withstand bitterness, hardness, coldness, ignorance and anger. Your one internal kindness will resolve, dissolve, and find answers to n+1 of them.

Words I didn't struggle for aren't mine.

I dogfood my own build 24/7.

Not a policeman but a maintainer.

Not a judge but a caring guardian. We are an ecosystem, and we should function as one.

Trust is the fuel.

Human relationships and human trust bring better products, better society, better future. Human-first, data-driven.

Secular but faithful.

We still stand on the good side and fight the evil side, regardless of whether God exists or not.

Values are never frozen in amber. They evolve along with the world and me, and they exist to guide me, not make me.

What I'm looking for

A team to join, and a team to build: its morale, its style. Senior Technical Program Manager, AI Program Lead, or Product Engineer at a company that actually wants to change how things work. Frankfurt, Germany -- remote-friendly.

I flourish in -1→1. Give me something broken or undefined and I'll find a way through it.

Senior Technical Program Manager AI Program Lead Product Engineer -1→1 AI-native Available now

Let's talk

Fastest way is email. Always up for a good conversation about building things that matter.

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