Engineering Leader · Tech Advisor · Builder

Dennis Vorobyov

Engineering manager and technical advisor to startups and Fortune 500 companies. I've spent my career at the intersection of product, engineering, and strategy: building teams, advising founders, and occasionally shipping things just to see if they work.

Forbes Technology Council Hampton Member Technical Advisor

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Engineering Consulting

Technical advisory and engineering leadership across startups and enterprises.

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MyFlyRight: 1M Flight Claims on a Rebuilt Platform

jQuery prototype inherited 2016, rebuilt from scratch on React + Laravel · algorithm-driven EU261 eligibility, qualified cases routed to lawyers · 1M+ claims across all EU airlines and jurisdictions · €100M+ recovered · top 10 Hamburg startup.

Greek House: From Stalled Releases to a 2024 Exit

Previous team shipped once every few months · CI/CD set up and shipping the same week · same-day releases through rush season · Inc. 5000 multiple years · official US college licensing · acquired 2024 · founder now building his next company with us.

Nautical Commerce: Embedded Team to SOC 2 and Scale

$30M raised from Drive Capital · 7 embedded engineers, one-year-old codebase · frontend rebuild, payments, multi-currency, multi-language, tax logic · enterprise-grade and SOC 2 ready · 200K+ monthly transactions · assets acquired by Traide.

Ripe: from Rebuild to Exit

Manhattan catering business with DigitalOcean, MongoDB, and Kickstarter as customers before a line of code · full platform built 2016: ordering, kitchen ops, delivery, billing · 1,000+ weekly orders · five years of support · acquired by Hungry, 2020.

Snapwire: Engineering Lead

Embedded engineering manager and technical product lead on Snapwire for two and a half years: V2 platform, Stripe Connect, and an image pipeline taken from 70% to 95% tagging accuracy.

Building HeyTutor: Seed to Series

Owning the architecture, infrastructure, hiring, and roadmap of a tutoring marketplace from 2016 to 2025, and handing it off clean.

Projects

Things I build for myself: experiments, tools, and ideas worth shipping.

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Hampton Review: Is It Worth It When Your City Doesn't Even Have a Chapter?

An honest Hampton review from a member without a local chapter. What the Core group is really like, where the $15K+ membership paid for itself, and who shouldn't join.

Netdata on real hardware: registration, sensors, and alert templates that don't lie

Netdata 2.10.3 · kickstart claim + claim.conf · go.d sensors and freeipmi against a Supermicro BMC · the silent boot race and the systemd timer fix · template vs alarm, lookup, hysteresis, netdatacli reload-health · alert on collector presence.

What It Took to Write and Publish 42

How a 12-chapter outline became a 22-chapter book · why the imprint, the ISBNs, and the insurance are worth it · one reproducible build for print and Kindle · free chapters as strategy · full numbers

What my roof antenna actually hears: three months of ADS-B on the Portuguese coast

Station T-LPAR4 · online since 2026-05-04 · Raspberry Pi + FlightAware Pro Stick Plus + FlightAware 5.5 dBi (DPD 9 dBi pending) · dump1090-fa / tar1090 / graphs1090 · feeding Flightradar24, FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange.

The Claude Code setup I actually run

Two-tier CLAUDE.md · path-scoped rule packs for web / Android / iOS / compute · 50 subagents across four stacks · guard-commit and format hooks · MIT at github.com/roadhero/claude-code-setup · from the book "42: The AI Builder's Stack."

Sanity CMS in 2026: The Headless CMS That Actually Respects Your Time

Migrated from Contentful after the free-plan crackdown · 20 seats, 10K documents, 1M CDN requests on Sanity's free tier · one-command migration via contentful-to-sanity · MCP integration for creating, patching, and auditing content without opening the Studio.

Writing

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Aug 2026 · Forbes Tech Council Generative AI In E-Commerce: Where The Returns Come From And How To Capture Them Where generative AI is actually paying back in e-commerce: supply chains and logistics ahead of chatbots, conversational shopping replacing keyword search, and agentic AI taking operational decisions, with McKinsey, Gartner, Adobe, and Amazon figures.

Forbes Tech Council

Aug 2026 · Sub-Etha Press 42: The AI Builder's Stack From First Prompt to Full Transformation

Sub-Etha Press

Jun 2026 · Forbes Tech Council What LLMs Are And What They're Not: A Practical Guide For Leaders Making Real Decisions About AI The Forbes piece, "What LLMs Are And What They're Not" (Jun 2026), explains to leaders how a large language model works: not a database or a search engine, but a system that generates answers from patterns learned in training, with knowledge frozen at that point.

Forbes Tech Council

Jul 2024 · Forbes Tech Council Navigating The Investment Landscape In Education Technology How education technology moved from a supplementary tool to the core of how education is delivered, and why investors favor startups that pair measurable learning outcomes with scalable business models. Covers personalized learning, adaptive AI, and the digital divide.

Forbes Tech Council

May 2024 · HackerNoon How to Choose the Best Staffing Model for App Development A comparison of team augmentation, outsourcing, and outstaffing for app development, with a question-by-question table on control, integration, budget flexibility, and delivery responsibility to help founders and project managers pick the model that fits.

HackerNoon

Press

Featured in leading publications.

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Aug 2015 Financial Times New world of work: digital marketplace reshapes casual labour

The FT piece, "New world of work: digital marketplace reshapes casual labour" (Aug 2015), explored how platforms like Upwork were reshaping global employment, with a focus on the Ukrainian tech freelance boom.

Financial Times Jun 2026 Forbes Tech Council What LLMs Are And What They're Not: A Practical Guide For Leaders Making Real Decisions About AI

The Forbes piece, "What LLMs Are And What They're Not" (Jun 2026), explains to leaders how a large language model works: not a database or a search engine, but a system that generates answers from patterns learned in training, with knowledge frozen at that point.

Forbes Tech Council

Credentials

Hampton