Vladimir Penkin

SmartDepo: legal deposition-summary product acquired by Rev in 2025. Inherited with no CI, tests, staging or secrets management, and only one engineer able to work on it.

• Delivered Multi-Witness processing, SmartDepo’s key product milestone of the year, coordinating changes across the AI backend, web frontend, database schemas and admin tooling; shipped on deadline and expanded the product’s addressable market.
• Owned hierarchical LLM summarization pipelines for legal depositions, mixing open-weight and commercial models via LiteLLM; processed ~1,000 depositions per week.
• Led technical integration of SmartDepo into Rev’s platform (auth, infrastructure, observability, scaling) in 4 months.
• Rebuilt delivery on Jenkins, Kubernetes and Terraform, going from 2 deploys per month to multiple per day; added unit tests and database migrations, keeping schemas in sync from local to production.
• Migrated the backend from AWS Lambda to Kubernetes and Terraform for reliability, adding dev and staging environments alongside production.
• Replaced hardcoded secrets with proper secrets management across a system split between 4 vendors (Supabase, Vercel, Azure, AWS).
• Mentored incoming engineers, contractors and QA through a year of heavy team turnover; upheld engineering standards across SmartDepo and Rev Legal through code review.

• Led the launch of Legal Essentials, a new high-margin product tier.
• Built checkout and ordering for Rev Legal offerings, handling millions of dollars in orders per year.
• Designed the workflow that turns a marketplace job into a final legal deliverable.
• Developed an editor for legal transcripts and depositions.
• Set up checkout and workflow analytics pipelines in Snowflake and Looker.
• Built foundational infrastructure for Legal Live Capture, a real-time streaming editor for documenting legal proceedings; piloted with select customers.

• Led development of Rev’s four core work editors (transcription, ASR review, captions, subtitles) through Rev’s ~10x revenue growth.
• Scaled the editors to tens of thousands of freelancers transcribing millions of minutes of audio, with autosave every second.
• Built freelancer marketplace tools: application process, earnings and performance dashboards, rating and quality control.
• Migrated a significant share of services from .NET Framework to .NET Core as part of a year-long company-wide migration.
• Owned the multi-caption selection epic end to end, from technical approach to coordinating other engineers’ contributions; mentored newer engineers through code review and pairing.

• Co-founded a Rails development shop with a US-based partner and relocated to Medellín, Colombia. Led engineering while my partner ran sales, clients and operations.
• Built an international team of up to 7 engineers from Colombia, Brazil, Russia, Romania and the US, working from our Medellín office and remotely. Recruited developers from Brazil.
• Worked full-time as a senior Rails engineer, embedded in US clients’ teams (BigBinary, Verdacom, TruckingOffice).
• Trained new hires in Ruby and Rails and mentored the team on engineering problems. Ran a free Ruby course for 5 aspiring developers.

• Developed bespoke project management tool for arbel-designs.com.
• Built data crawlers and analytics pipelines at Visual Systems Research Group (VSRG).
• Developed CV application tool and file conversion service at Jobstar.se.
• Application design, maintenance and upgrade for Ruby projects at railsrescue.com.

• Built bespoke auctions platform on top of Magento e-commerce solution for bstock.com.
• Developed e-commerce websites and modules using Magento e-commerce framework, bespoke plugins for WordPress platform, Zend Framework, PHP, MySQL at oggetto.team.
• Developed admin panel and spellchecking solution for WebMail product at afterlogic.com.