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I engaged two Toptal engineers, Vadim and Artur, for my company Talkmap over a period of six years,

I engaged two Toptal engineers, Vadim and Artur, for my company Talkmap over a period of six years, and I cannot speak highly enough of both the talent and the experience.

Vadim, our Senior Software Engineer, single-handedly built and owned our entire multi-tenant Cloner platform: a sophisticated provisioning system whose Temporal workflows enabled thousands of client deployments across three EKS clusters with real-time monitoring and release tracking. He also architected a central Go API that consolidated a 9-service architecture using gRPC, REST, and Temporal workflow orchestration, dramatically simplifying our operations. He introduced ClickHouse for fast analytical querying, refactored our database layer for efficiency, and built job orchestration for LLM-powered data extraction processing over 3 million conversations per month. Vadim is extraordinarily fast, delivers production-grade systems with remarkable consistency, and his code is clean and built to last.

Artur, our Senior AI Engineer and Architect, was the driving force behind our entire AI and machine learning capability. He designed and implemented real-time intent classification, summarization, and generative AI services on transformer architectures. His LLM optimization work reduced our inference costs by 3x to 10x while exceeding baseline performance: a game-changing achievement for our business economics. He fine-tuned foundation models, built end-to-end AI inference pipelines, architected our self-hosted GPU inference on NVIDIA clusters, and continuously benchmarked state-of-the-art models and techniques to keep our platform at the leading edge.

Together, Vadim and Artur formed the technical backbone of Talkmap. Vadim built the platform and infrastructure that powered everything, while Artur built the AI intelligence that made it valuable. Both are exceptionally skilled, fast, reliable, and a genuine pleasure to work with. They communicated clearly, took full ownership of their domains, and consistently delivered beyond expectations.

Date of experience: Feb 24, 2026