Ivan Bilan is an Engineering Manager at Personio, an HR software company, where he currently works on Identity and Access Management. His path into engineering is somewhat unusual: he came to production machine learning from a linguistics background, and that foundation still shows in how he thinks about language technologies, from tokenization to the tradeoffs between off-the-shelf LLMs and in-house pipelines.

His main technical interests include building microservices for data-intensive applications, MLOps for NLP, and deep learning research. Ivan has spent years turning NLP research into dependable production systems, covering the full pipeline from data annotation and task engineering to testing, deployment, and observability, and working with tools such as spaCy and Hugging Face alongside large language models.

As a manager, Ivan focuses on the human side of ML systems as much as the technical one: how to structure NLP teams, what to look for when hiring NLP engineers, and when to bring specialists such as linguists or conversational designers into the mix. He writes about these topics on Medium and speaks regularly on production NLP, MLOps, and AI adoption in the enterprise.