Nikita Baklazhenko

Senior AI Engineer · Agentic Systems, Evaluation & Production ML

Senior AI Engineer with a track record of taking agentic and ML systems from prototype to production. Built the agent architecture, shared platform and evaluation harness that the Novartis finance data-science department builds its agents on, after delivering ML forecasts covering €20B+ in yearly costs across 30+ countries. Outside work, built and launched production multi-agent apps and open-source agent evaluation tooling.

Experience

NovartisBarcelona, Spain
Sep 2023 – Present
Senior AI Expert · leading the agentic platform since Apr 2026
Oct 2026 – Present
  • Build the backbone architecture and shared platform for agentic apps: agent-to-agent design patterns, reusable Python packages, internal integrations and CI/CD templates so teams ship agents consistently and faster.
  • Design LangGraph multi-agent finance systems on AWS: orchestrator–subagent patterns, semantic models over SQL data, reusable subagents (knowledge retrieval, SQL research, dynamic charts) and human-in-the-loop.
  • Run a production finance agent over 100M+ data points across 100+ tables, holding hallucinations under 1% across live user interactions and tester sessions.
  • Develop the evaluation harness used by every agentic app: LLM-as-a-judge and deterministic metrics on fixture, ground-truth and synthetic test sets. Architecture, model or context changes ship only on measurable gains.
  • Ship full-stack agentic apps (React/TypeScript, FastAPI on AWS Lambda, ECR, S3, DynamoDB) with hallucination guardrails, tracing, staged fallbacks and continuous feedback loops.
Expert Data Scientist · joined as Data Scientist, promoted Jun 2025
Sep 2023 – Oct 2026
  • Replaced a quarterly, Excel-based finance forecast with daily automated ML forecasts covering €20B+ in yearly costs across 30+ countries — now the baseline for analysts and senior finance managers.
  • Cut per-country quarterly MAPE to under 1% — 50%+ better than analyst forecasts, with significantly larger gains at finer granularity — saving 150+ analyst hours a month.
  • Product owner of the gross-to-net and tech-ops forecasting products: took them from POC to production and ran the roadmap, stakeholder alignment and quarterly business reviews.
  • Shipped agentic products into finance workflows: multi-agent systems on AWS Bedrock and OpenAI Agents SDK, function-calling agents over Snowflake/Databricks, RAG over policy corpora and MCP servers for forecasting.
  • Owned LLM rollout: model selection (Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama), Langfuse tracing, compliance review.
Citibeats · Data ScientistBarcelona, Spain
Mar 2023 – Jul 2023
  • Classified millions of social-media posts for WHO and UNDP with fine-tuned BERT/Llama in 10+ languages.

Earlier: Transfer Pricing Consultant, PwC (2021) · Teaching Assistant, Statistics & Microeconomics, HSE (2019–22)

Projects & Open Source

Periplo — solo-built AI trip planner, ~500 monthly users
Web · iOS · Android · periploapp.com
  • 5 orchestrators and 10+ agents on a FastAPI/GCP backend with SSE streaming, token budgets and staged fallbacks; OAuth-secured MCP servers for Claude and ChatGPT; React Native apps on the App Store and Google Play.
PolicyArena — open-source agent evaluation engine
pip install policy-arena · policyarena.dev
  • Benchmarks rule-based, RL and LLM agents across 15+ game-theoretic environments under repeatable conditions; provider-agnostic across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek and Ollama.

Also: PasteReady — agentic document assistant that reads email and documents and triggers workflows such as hotel and flight check-ins or ID renewals · Hoodwise (neighbourhood scoring) · ROIInvest (property analytics).

Skills

Agentic AI & LLMs: LangGraph, LangChain, OpenAI Agents SDK, MCP servers (FastMCP, OAuth 2.1), agent evaluation (LLM-as-a-judge), agent memory, RAG, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini SDKs, LoRA fine-tuning, vLLM

ML: Time-series forecasting, gradient boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost), NLP, PyTorch, scikit-learn

Engineering & MLOps: Python, TypeScript, React, FastAPI, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, unit/integration/E2E testing, AWS (Lambda, ECR, S3, DynamoDB, SageMaker, Step Functions), GCP Cloud Run, Terraform, MLflow, Langfuse

Data: SQL, Snowflake, Databricks, PySpark, Polars

Languages: English (fluent), Russian (native), Spanish (intermediate)

Education

MSc Data Science · Barcelona School of Economics · top 20%
2022 – 2023
BSc Economics · HSE University, Saint Petersburg · top 10% · Erasmus year at UCL
2018 – 2022