Open to opportunities

Aleksandr Nifontov

@aleksandrnifontov

AI and LLM Engineer building production RAG systems, including an end-to-end internal business system at Carlsberg Group.

Georgia

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm looking for remote LLM Engineer, AI Engineer, or ML Engineer roles, either contract (B2B) or full-time.

At Carlsberg Group, I built a production RAG system end-to-end as the sole engineer, combining FAISS retrieval, metadata filtering, reranking, and a validation-agent cascade to reduce hallucinations. I also fine-tuned LLaMA with QLoRA and evaluated the system on retrieval and answer-quality measures.

I now build and maintain AI products and contract projects, including ITInterviewCoach, a production interview-preparation product with paying users, and a hybrid RAG MVP for legal documents. My work spans LLM agents, evaluation, and forecasting; at Carlsberg Group, my forecasting work improved forecast accuracy by 4% and demand planning efficiency by 15%.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founder & AI Engineer

Current

ITInterviewCoach

Apr 2026 - Present (6 months)

AI interview-preparation product on Telegram, in production with paying users.
- Built from zero to production: mock interviews with scoring, CV/LinkedIn analysis, topic preparation, and live coding with a 4-phase FSM.
- Multi-provider LLM routing with cascading fallback (Groq - OpenRouter - Mistral), controlled by feature flags.
- CV pipeline: PDF/DOCX parsing - PII scrubbing - LLM structuring -

AI LLM LLM APIs LLMOps LLM Evaluation LLM Inference LLM Security LLM Integrations Docker Python

Current

AI / LLM Engineer (Contract)

Current

Self-employed

Dec 2025 - Present (10 months)

Remote contract work on LLM and ML systems.
Hybrid RAG over legal documents — US startup (Mar 2026 – May 2026)
- Built a hybrid RAG MVP combining BM25 and dense vector retrieval over legal documents.
- Delivered the MVP, a demo, and a retrieval and answer quality evaluation.
- The project ended at MVP stage.
Out-of-stock prediction — hypermarket chain (Dec 2025 – Feb 2026)
- Predicted out-of-stock

AI RAG Hybrid Retrieval Systems

Current

Founder & AI Engineer

Current

FoodTrack — Personal AI Nutrition Assistant

Jun 2025 - Present (1 year 4 months)

Building and maintaining a personal AI nutrition assistant integrated with Telegram and deployed on Azure.
- Generates meal plans based on dietary restrictions, ingredient availability, kitchen equipment, seasonality, and user preferences.
- Iterative menu assembly with LLM-as-Judge validation to improve consistency of generated plans.
- Content recommendations with pgvector embeddings and a user

AI LLM LLMOps LLM Evaluation OpenAI API Vector Databases Vector Search

AI/ML Engineer

Carlsberg Group

May 2020 - Dec 2025 (5 years 7 months)

Baltika Breweries (part of Carlsberg Group until December 2024).
Designed, deployed, and maintained production ML and LLM-based systems for internal business users, working across the full lifecycle from requirements discussion to deployment and production support.
- Built a production RAG system end-to-end as the sole engineer: FAISS vector search with metadata filtering - bge-reranker-small - va

AI RAG Fine Tuned LLMs Machine Learning MLOps LLMOps

Data Scientist (Part-Time)

SCM-Academy

Apr 2022 - Jul 2024 (2 years 3 months)

Built a reserve stock calculation algorithm, lowering inventory levels by 10% without compromising service quality.
Developed product allocation algorithms, reducing client penalties for under-deliveries by 37%.
Designed scenario planning models to identify production bottlenecks, cutting annual employee overtime by 28%.
Enhanced daily production planning using machine learning, improving response

Machine Learning Optimization Docker

Data Analyst

Carlsberg Group

May 2019 - May 2020 (1 year)

Implemented automated data quality checks, significantly reducing errors

Successfully advocated for and coordinated the adoption of Python across IT and Information Security departments

Demand Planner

Carlsberg Group

May 2018 - May 2019 (1 year)

Worked as Demand Planner at Carlsberg Group.

Analyst

GreenCard (Loyalty Program)

Sep 2015 - Jul 2017 (1 year 10 months)

Led targeted marketing initiatives and optimized partner turnover forecasts to support strategic business planning.
Conducted customer behavior analysis, increasing lifetime value (LTV) by 25%.
Developed fraud detection reporting, reducing financial losses by 9%.