About
A question I keep returning to: what’s the most important thing to do in a world where AI has made intelligence and labor abundant?
My answer, for now, is to help people become more fully human. I’m an AI engineer working in the Alpha School ecosystem — schools that condense academic learning to two hours a day and give kids their time back, so they can develop real skills, find what they love, and learn how to live.
My work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, learning design, emotional intelligence, and human flourishing.
Background
My childhood was split between the United States and post-Soviet Moscow — an Irish-Catholic mother and a Russian immigrant father. That early exposure to radically different worlds gave me a sense that the way things are is never the only way they could be.
In my early twenties I left college and spent several years doing public service work across the United States — building homes, trails, and community projects. I met a lot of people living hard lives with real dignity. It shaped how I think about what matters.
Later I returned to college to study economics. Around the same time I discovered gymnastics, which quickly became an obsession. For several years I trained intensely — handstands, rings, planche progressions — sometimes twenty hours a week.
Gymnastics taught me something I’ve never forgotten: meaningful progress comes through consistent, patient practice over long periods of time. There are no shortcuts to hard skills.
After college I worked in tech — first as a data scientist, then across several roles in software. I was good at it, but I kept noticing that the problems I cared about most — motivation, meaning, human development — weren’t primarily technical.
Turning point
It was an excruciating heartbreak that catalyzed a period of personal upheaval — the kind that strips away the life you’d built and forces you to examine what’s underneath — that pushed me toward deeper questions about suffering, meaning, and how to live.
I sought retreat. I found teachers — Dustin DiPerna, Joe Hudson, and Anurag Gupta — and spent years studying meditation, contemplative traditions, and the relational practices that help people become more honest with themselves and each other. I came to believe, as Joe has put it, that the scarcest and most precious quantity in the world is attuned, loving presence.
In 2024 I launched a coaching practice and worked with over two dozen men on their businesses, bodies, and inner lives. It was among the most demanding and rewarding things I’ve done. It also clarified something: I wanted to work at scale, not just one person at a time.
That’s what drew me to Gauntlet in fall 2025 — an intensive AI engineering program — and eventually to the work I’m doing now in education. The inner and the outer have always been connected for me. I don’t think you can build good learning environments without understanding what it actually takes for a person to grow.
Come see what I’m doing now.