2025
Head of AI Department
GK SOLLERS · 2025—
Own the group’s AI function: growing the ML infrastructure and putting models into production and business processes.
HEAD OF AI · GK SOLLERS
Ilya Manyakin
AI in production, not in a slide deck: models, infrastructure, and the people who have to live with both.
I / ABOUT
From freelance Python pages to running an AI department inside a large industrial group.
I lead the artificial intelligence department at GK Sollers: from the ML platform and its infrastructure to getting models into the group’s business processes.
Before that I went from freelance development to CEO of my own IT company. I write Python, live in Kubernetes, and care about models that live in production rather than on a laptop.
- 2019
- SINCE
- 3
- COMPANIES
- 20+
- PROJECTS
- ∞
- PRODUCTION
II / TRAJECTORY
2024
Chief Executive Officer
IKM SOFT LLC · 2024—2025
Owned my own IT company: product development in Python, architecture, clients, and all of the operations.
2019
Freelance Developer
FREELANCE · 2019—2024
Web services, automation and infrastructure: Python, Docker, nginx — from landing pages to servers under load.
III / TOOLS
- Python
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- nginx
- Linux/Unix
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Helm
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- GitLab CI
- MLflow
- PyTorch
- Airflow
- Ansible
- Bash
IV / NOTES
-
12 AUG 2026 · 1 MIN READ
Rollback matters more than a perfect deploy
The perfect deploy happens once a year; every system falls over eventually. That is why the first scenario our CI tests is not the rollout but the rollback.
-
04 JUN 2026 · 1 MIN READ
Models live in production, not on a laptop
A laptop with 97% accuracy and a service running the same checkpoint are two different models. What changes when inference moves into Kubernetes.
-
19 MAR 2026 · 1 MIN READ
The boring layer in front of the model
Half of all "inference problems" are solved by an nginx in front of FastAPI: limits, timeouts, caching and honest 503s. Cheaper than scaling GPUs.