Home
QR code linking to korya.dev/resume

Dmitri Kochelorov

CEO & Co-founder, FrontSail AI ↗

Zero to one, four times over. Firmware, a cloud platform, AI agents. Now an agentic OS for small business.

Whoever ships a feature owns the whole of it, from the first bit of research out to production. I learned that at Jungo, where there was nobody else to do the work, and later built a 20-person R&D org around it. Eighteen years on, I still write code most days.

Kitchener, ON · Canada @kochelorov on LinkedIn ↗@korya on GitHub ↗Blog (korya.dev) Download PDF ↓
4×
zero to one
firmware, cloud platform, AI agents, agentic OS
1 → 20+
engineers
hired and led. The org still runs without me
2 months
to a shipped agent
clients were using it daily by month six
SOC 2
at enterprise scale
and no dedicated ops team to lean on
Eighteen years, five chapters
bootloader up to the web UI Firmware 2008 to 2013 1 → 20+ engineers Platform & org 2014 to 2024 AI pipeline, back to being an IC Data 2024 to 2025 zero to daily use in six months Agents 2025 agentic OS for small business Founder 2025 to now
Work

CEO & Co-founder, FrontSail AI ↗

An agentic operating system for small business. It takes the repetitive back-office work off the owner’s plate so they can get back to running the place.

Nov 2025 to now
  • Founded with two partners. The platform is live, with small businesses using it across Canada and the US.
  • Two product lines out in seven months: an AI phone receptionist in January 2026, back-office automation in June 2026.
more + less −
  • Still early. We are building for the segment most software companies skip, because the contracts look too small to bother with.

Founding Software Engineer, Starboard ↗

AI agents that let freight forwarders run and scale operations without adding headcount.

Feb to Dec 2025
  • Joined when the company was three people. Shipped the first freight-forwarder agent in two months, and clients were using it daily by month six.
  • This was March 2025, before the primitives existed. Session handling, auth, security, reliability: we worked out our own answers to all of it, on models that would cheerfully hallucinate in front of a paying customer.
more + less −
  • Shipped an Outlook add-in that reads rate sheets, pulls data out of PDFs and spreadsheets, and drafts replies to RFQs. Python and GCP behind it.
  • Stack: OpenAI and Gemini, Agent SDK, Python, TypeScript, React, Supabase, Upstash Redis, Elasticsearch, GCP.

Staff Software Engineer, Klue ↗

Data quality for the AI pipeline behind competitive insights. A deliberate step back into an IC role.

Sep 2024 to Feb 2025
  • Integrated CRM and public web sources, then redesigned the core data models and pipelines so the ML models had wider and cleaner input to work from.
more + less −
  • Stack: Python, TypeScript, React, OpenAI, Perplexity, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, GCP.

Technical R&D Director, Planitar ↗

First engineer → 20+ person R&D org behind the iGUIDE, Canada’s leading 3D virtual tour platform.

Jun 2014 to Aug 2024
  • Hired as the first engineer to turn a prototype into a product. Built the image-processing pipeline, the cloud infrastructure and the customer portal that became iGUIDE.
  • Grew and ran the whole R&D org, 20+ engineers across several teams. Hiring was the hard part: Kitchener-Waterloo during COVID, competing with American companies who had no budget ceiling, while I very much did.
more + less −
  • Owned product direction alongside architecture until we hired our first product manager in 2022.
  • Stood up a UX design function, and an ML research team of scientists and engineers who automated our internal drafting work with deep learning.
  • Go and Node microservices on AWS, orchestrated with Docker, CoreOS, Nomad and Terraform. We reached SOC 2 and high availability for enterprise customers: BGIS, who manage facilities for the Government of Canada, insurance partners SeekNow and Colonial Claims, and municipalities across the US and Canada.
  • Ran the org on the same rule I grew up with at Jungo, which mostly meant hiring people willing to learn a domain rather than specialists who wanted a lane.
  • The org still runs today, two years after I left. That is the part I am proudest of.

Embedded Software Engineer, Jungo ↗

Portable, hardware-agnostic firmware for residential routers. Netanya, Israel; later acquired by Cisco.

Sep 2008 to Dec 2013
  • Everyone did everything. Bootloaders one week, Wi-Fi kernel drivers the next, then the orchestration logic, then the HTML and JavaScript config UI. This is where the habit comes from.
  • Led the Vodafone 3G/LTE module, which was territory nobody at the company had touched. I researched the domain, turned Vodafone’s requirements into an architecture that fit our hardware-agnostic firmware, and shipped it.
more + less −
  • It brought connectivity to mountainous and rural regions, Italy among them, where fixed infrastructure was thin. It shipped in VOX 1.5 and 2.0 gateways across Europe.
  • Stack: C/C++, JavaScript, Linux kernel, drivers, bootloaders.
Alongside

Cosmic Lift ↗ · Jan 2025 to now
My consulting practice. Fractional CTO work, training, and product architecture and development for companies going AI-first, or making what they already have AI-ready.

Tools I’m fluent in

AI: OpenAI and Gemini, Agent SDKs, retrieval, document extraction, evals, agent reliability.
Languages: Go, Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C/C++, Bash.
Infra: AWS, GCP, Docker, Nomad, Kubernetes, Terraform, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch.
Front end: React, Vue, AngularJS.

How I work
  • Range beats specialization on a small team. I hire for curiosity and let people pick up the domain on the job.
  • I stay in the code. That did not change when I started running an org, and it has not changed now.
  • Learning a new domain is part of the job, not a prerequisite for it. Firmware, 3D imaging, freight, agents: none of them were mine to start with.
  • I would rather ship something small that works than something large that demos well.
Education

B.Sc. Computer Software Engineering

Technion, Israel Institute of Technology ↗, Haifa

2006 to 2012