Curriculum Vitae

Aleksejs Kovaļovs

Director of AI Development Candidate · 15+ Years Experience

Riga, Latvia · Born in 1990 (Age 36)

Contacts

Email: aleks4444@inbox.lv

Phone: +371 26185369

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kovalovs-lv

Portfolio: kovalovs.lv

Education

↬ 2013-2015 Institute of Transport and Telecommunications

Master’s degree in Information Systems

↬ 2009-2013 Institute of Transport and Telecommunications

Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering

↬ 2011 Institute of Transport and Telecommunications

IT Project Management qualification course

Work experience

↬ Since Mar. 2025 (1 year 7 months)

AS Mapon

Engineering Manager

↬ Jan. 2022 – Mar. 2025 (3 years 2 months)

SIA Inbokss (inbox.lv)

Project Manager / technical lead

↬ Sep. 2020 – May 2026 (5 years 8 months)

Biedrība Zārdi

Member of the Board (Civic Leadership / Non-Profit)

↬ Nov. 2016 – Nov. 2021 (5 years)

SIA Inbokss (inbox.lv)

PHP Developer / pp.lv backend team

↬ Apr. 2011 – Nov. 2016 (5 years 8 months)

AS DNB Banka

Functional Analyst / core banking team

Experience and Qualities

✓ Applied ML & LLM Evolution (2010–Present): University ML exposure (2010), pre-LLM fraud neural nets (2022), RAG support bots, and on-premise LLM spam filters (2025)

✓ 10x AI SDLC Transformation (Mapon): Rebuilt team workflow where AI executes ~90% of tasks from refinement & coding to stage testing, Jira & sprint repo reporting

✓ Core Banking & High-Load Scale: 5.5 yrs DNB Bank rigor, millions of daily users at inbox.lv (99.9%+ availability), 400,000+ real-time IoT devices at Mapon

✓ People Leadership & Sustainable Pacing: Leading 7 direct reports (9 peer teams), psychological safety, IT exit interviews, and managing 10x cognitive load to prevent burnout

✓ Hands-On Agentic Engineering: Returned to coding via AI without an IDE — resolving legacy memory leaks & logs at work; built Ari CRM (MCP) & Obsidian plugin (2,000+ downloads)

✓ Strategic Roadmaps & Delivery Predictability: Quarterly OKR planning with Product & Executive leadership, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and automated CI/CD & E2E quality gates

Leadership Scope & Technical Governance

People Leadership, Pacing & Culture

❖ Drive psychological safety and a blameless culture, leading a high-trust engineering team of 7 direct reports
❖ Guard against 10x burnout recognizing that 10x AI velocity causes acute mental fatigue; tracking team state and pacing work via structured 1-on-1s
❖ Conduct exit interviews across the IT department, analyzing feedback to systematically improve team retention

Hands-On AI Coding & Architecture

❖ Resolve complex legacy issues returned to coding via AI (nearly IDE-free) on a massive legacy codebase: handling support, cross-team requests, log analysis, and memory leaks
❖ Build AI-native pet projects created Ari CRM (plugin architecture, MCP, full tests/linters), Encrypted 1-on-1 (E2EE), and an Obsidian plugin (2,000+ downloads)
❖ Set architectural guardrails maintaining shared technical alignment and consolidating fragmented solutions into reusable platforms across 9 peer teams

10x AI SDLC & Team Enablement (Mapon)

❖ Rebuild SDLC around AI (~90%) automating task creation, analysis, refinement, meeting question prep, implementation, and deployment plans
❖ Automate reviews, QA & reporting running AI-driven local and external code reviews, test environment validation, Jira updates, and sprint repo reporting
❖ Lead hands-on AI workshops upskilling engineers in agentic workflows while accounting for human meta-context that AI cannot digitize

Strategy, OKRs & Cross-Team Alignment

❖ Influence technical strategy partnering with Product and Executive leadership on quarterly roadmap planning, resource trade-offs, and technical priorities
❖ Define team OKRs and delivery milestones, unblocking cross-team dependencies, mitigating operational risks, and elevating observability
❖ Modernize documentation & ADRs facilitating architecture forums, implementing Architecture Decision Records, and maintaining a single source of truth

ML & On-Premise LLM Projects (inbox.lv)

❖ Lead pre-LLM fraud detection guided an engineer in late 2022 in training a neural network to classify new registrations as real users, bots, or fraudsters
❖ Build LLM & RAG PoCs led development of an AI email translator PoC and a support agent powered by a vector database of internal documentation
❖ Deploy on-premise spam LLMs connected LLMs to spam filters in 2025 using dedicated self-hosted hardware to keep sensitive email data off the cloud

Platform, CI/CD & Operational Rigor

❖ Champion automated cloud CI/CD resolving day-long manual frontend build merge locks and optimizing cloud runner resource consumption
❖ Introduce automated E2E testing establishing end-to-end testing rituals to prevent release regressions and protect deployment confidence
❖ Core banking & high-load roots 5.5 years in DNB core banking systems and 5 years building high-throughput mail services handling millions of daily messages