I'm Rost — a lead front-end engineer in London. I make explainable tools where the logic is yours to see, not a black box to trust.
Ukrainian by birth, Londoner by postcode.
Who's typing
By trade I'm a front-end lead — React, TypeScript, big monorepos, design systems. Most recently I ran front-end for The Stepstone Group's job-application flow, the one millions of people across Europe use to land something better. Over the years I've shipped across recruitment, healthcare, adtech and geodata, and picked up opinions about all of them. But I've never treated the front-end as where my job ends. I like to understand the whole system: the data underneath, the design on top, the product around it, and the reason it exists.
I'm from Chernivtsi, by way of Kyiv. I fell for London on a few short visits — somewhere between the work and the wandering. Since 2021 it's been home for me and my family.
Away from the keyboard: my family, hiking — wild country or unfamiliar corners of the city, wherever I can get half-lost — and a soft spot for board games and the occasional sprawling video game. I photograph the streets while I walk, and the keepers end up on Instagram.
Previously: Entia (a home blood-testing device), Ninety Percent of Everything, MyHeritage.
Things I've built
These are independent builds — concept, design, front and back end, mostly my own two hands. No team, no funding, no roadmap but my own.
Decision-making app
A quiet place to lay out your options and rate them against your criteria — not stars, badges, or whatever the algorithm wants you to value. No streaks, no urgency banners, no nudges. It gives you a frame; the judgment stays yours. It has a companion, too — Conscious Tabs, a browser extension that brings the same calm to a cluttered tab bar.
UK liveability map
An early, still-growing experiment: a map of England you recolour by what you care about — schools, quiet, green space, nightlife, the daily commute. Built entirely on open data, with one rule: indicators are facts, scores are opinions. Every colour traces back to a number you can check.
Pub party game
Answer five cheeky questions, let it scan your “aura” through the camera, and an AI agent crowns you something gloriously useless — spirit pizza topping, inner houseplant, Hogwarts house. Vibe-coded in one pub session; best played loudly, round a table.
You knew this was coming
I go back far enough that getting online meant phoning the internet down a landline, and "deploying" a server meant zipping my actual desktop tower into a backpack and cycling it across half the city to the provider. The web has reinvented itself every few years since, and most of my career has been navigating that churn: learning which new things are worth chasing and which are just this year's fashion.
AI is the newest of those, and for what it's worth, I don't think it's a fad; it's here to stay, and learning to wield it well is its own craft — one I'm genuinely excited to master. But it asks engineers to be more professional, not less. When a model can write a thousand lines in a breath, the scarce thing stops being code and becomes judgement: what's worth building, how it behaves, where it could hurt someone, and whether you'd put your name to it. The excitement and the responsibility, the way I see it, are the same job.
What I value
The person on the other side of the screen isn't a metric to move — they're someone to understand and look after. And it's never just the user. The work that lasts comes from caring about the whole picture — the people who'll use what I build, the business betting on it, and the team building it alongside me. I follow my curiosity and plan for the uncertainty that tags along. I'd rather flag a problem early than patch it late. Three things matter to me more than any line on a CV: honesty, dedication, and actually giving a damn.