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Vitalii Pavliuk — Senior Backend Engineer at Preply

Senior Backend Engineer at Preply · AI Engineer · Researcher & Speaker

Vitalii Pavliuk

Hey! I'm Vitalii — a Senior Backend Engineer at Preply and a PhD candidate in Computer Science. I work on backend systems, LLM-powered applications and automation, and I research how to make generative AI reliable enough to trust where the cost of being wrong is high.

About

Vitalii Pavliuk (Ukrainian: Віталій Павлюк) is a Ukrainian software engineer, AI practitioner, researcher and speaker. He is a Senior Backend Engineer at Preply and a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the National University of Water and Environmental Engineering, with a master's degree in Computer Science from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.

His work sits between backend engineering and applied AI: high-load systems and API design on one side, multi-stage LLM pipelines, evaluation and automation on the other. He publishes peer-reviewed research on generative AI and labour-market intelligence, teaches Python, and speaks at engineering conferences.

Featured work

Production LLM pipelines running on local models, a cloud bill cut by 90%, an AI assistant deliberately built without write access to the source of truth.

See selected projects

Research

PhD research on generative AI, decision science and labour-market intelligence — three peer-reviewed papers so far, in Modeling, Control and Information Technologies.

Read the research and publications

Speaking

I talk about what actually breaks when a language model leaves the demo and lands in production: hallucination risk, evaluation, and the cost of inference.

See talks and slides

Writing

Notes on backend engineering, LLM systems and automation — mostly short-form, mostly in my Telegram channel.

See where I write

Career and education

2024 — now
Preply
Senior Backend Engineer (since 2025)
Go to website
2023 — now
National University of Water and Environmental Engineering
PhD candidate in Computer Science
Go to website
2022 — 2024
Kavall
Full-Stack Engineer
2016 — 2022
Universum Global
Software Engineer, then Engineering Lead
Go to website
2020 — 2024
BotsPlatform
Volunteer engineering for local communities
2013 — 2019
Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
Master's degree in Computer Science
Go to website

Beyond code

23 countries visited
Curious about the world and open to new things.
Amateur triathlete
Cycling, running and endurance races — sport as a tool for discipline and systems thinking.
Training log on Strava
Smart home and self-hosting
Home Assistant (Zigbee, ESP32, MQTT), Raspberry Pi, home servers, DNS and networking.
Five years of it, written up on DOU

Follow my work

Most of what I learn and build I share in my Telegram channel.

My Telegram channel
“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

— Henry Ford

Contact

Email is the most reliable way to reach me. I read everything, and I answer anything concrete.

Email me