Vladimir Vinogradov · Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
For over 15 years I have built software that runs day to day: as lead developer and architect of the Vodafone Voice Assistant, with founding experience from three tech companies and today with Vingrad GmbH's own AI platforms in production. You engage Vingrad GmbH for technical leadership, architecture or building an AI system — as an engagement with a clear result.
Three kinds of engagement — depending on what your project is missing right now.
Leading a project technically, from goal to production.
I take technical responsibility for a defined project: setting goals and architecture, breaking down the work, setting priorities, signing off and handing over results. Aligning with your team and your contractors is part of it.
Target architecture, blueprints or an honest outside view.
I design how AI components fit into your existing landscape — cloud or on-prem, through APIs, events and interfaces to legacy systems — and write it down as architecture blueprints and standards that business, IT and security can all read. I translate between business and technology: I understand what the business and stakeholders need, and I align solutions with system architecture and IT security until everyone stands behind them. Or I look at your system and tell you what holds, what breaks and what it will cost.
Building the AI system, code included.
Python, TypeScript, PHP or Go, focused on LLM applications, backend and infrastructure. Experience here mostly means fewer detours and decisions that still hold a year later.
I have been sitting in front of a computer since I was three — my father soldered it together himself. My parents are engineers, and my curiosity about how things work on the inside comes from them.
On the old machines, some games dropped you straight into the program code with a key combination. I started rewriting games long before I knew this was called programming.
Not much has changed: at home I run my own small data centre, which hosts my products, and I learn something new every day — you can follow along in the journal. Technology is not a career I happened to choose; it is what I like doing most.
Products owned by Vingrad GmbH. Architecture, development and operations are mine — down to the nightly backup.
AI platform for content marketing.
Strategy first, then the text: knowledge base, competitive analysis and publishing across channels. Agencies also run the platform under their own brand.
Data platform with self-learning extraction.
Collects and structures content from the web. The platform learns how pages are built and no longer needs a language model for known structures — which noticeably lowers the cost per page.
Answers customer enquiries on behalf of the provider.
Answers a platform’s visitors in chat — from a knowledge base built from the provider’s website and their own corrections. Answers can be approved before they go out, each one stays traceable with its approval, and the language model is replaceable. Several bots share one conversation window without seeing each other’s knowledge.
Content analysis with a knowledge graph.
Finds people, organisations and topics in texts and links them into a knowledge graph you can search and analyse.
What I have built and operated — and what I stood behind.
2023 →
Architecture, build and operation of three platforms: multi-tenant content intelligence with RAG and LLM agents, a data platform with self-learning extraction, and an analysis application. LLMOps from pipeline to production: orchestration through queues and events, own model serving (vLLM) next to cloud APIs, monitoring and cost per transaction. Plus the governance layer regulated environments ask for — versioned prompts, an immutable decision log per model call, human-in-the-loop review.
2017–2022
At Vodafone Group, developer on the Voice Assistant for Alexa and Google Assistant built on DialogFlow: microservices on AWS serverless (Node.js, TypeScript, Lambda), rolled out to local operating companies and partners. We later extended the engine with further channels, including LivePerson and Google RCS Business Messaging (rich messages). The core was integration — bringing together backend systems of the group and of acquired companies, each with its own landscape. Then at Vodafone Germany, lead developer and architect of the German version built on the group platform, responsible for its architecture, operation and development for about three years. Followed by advising Mazda Motor Europe on integrating language models into their voice and chatbot platform.
2010–2019
Cagoi Networks AG (platform as a service), SlidePort UG (HTML5 CMS, Innovation Award IT and EVC NRW Award) and Zasta GmbH (automated tax returns, on AWS with RDS). From those years I know clients, quotes, team and technology from both sides of the table. Today I run Vingrad GmbH.
2009 →
Evonik Industries, Alcatel/TCL (Excellence Award 2018), A.T. Kearney and others: platforms, portals and applications in continuous operation — from architecture through high availability to being reachable when it breaks.
What I am working on and what I learn along the way — updated continuously.
2026-10-27 · Architecture
Write to the database first, then send the event: that works until the process crashes right in between. So in a messenger I moved the side effects into an outbox.
2026-10-27 · AI in production
A vehicle dealer has the images from its 360° studio processed by an external service. The question was whether we could do it ourselves at least as well. Segmentation was solved quickly — the difficulty lay elsewhere.
2026-10-26 · Architecture
Five new features for a messenger that teams install on their own server with one command. Each could have dragged in a service of its own. In the end, none was added.
Book a first call directly or write to me about what you need. I reply within one working day — even if the answer is “not a fit”.
vv@vingrad.comPhone +41 76 531 32 64
Vingrad GmbH