Meet Danylo Sovgut.An astrophysicist turned AI engineer.
I build retrieval pipelines, evaluation systems, and inference infrastructure for ML products that ship to real users — not just notebooks.
Selected Work
ML pricing pipeline for sync licensing
Two-stage classifier + soft-routed regression, invented after standard approaches (quantile regression, conformal prediction, Bayesian quantile) failed on the long-tailed distribution. Shipped as a FastMCP server with Shapley-value explanations, alongside four other tools the licensing team uses in their internal AI chat.
- Reduction in MAE vs the legacy rate card
- ~78%
- Projected annual revenue uplift
- $7M+
- MCP tools in production for the licensing team
- 5
Integrated AI ops stack for a VC firm
Connected six previously disconnected tools (Attio, Notion, Granola, Box, Gmail, Slack) into one Claude-driven workspace. Eight Claude Projects + six Cowork automations + a $0/mo Python news monitor.
- Solo build, end-to-end
- ~1 month
- Custom Claude Projects in production
- 8
- Custom news monitor infra cost
- $0
Investment memo writer for VC partners
Multi-source ingest (CRM + Notion + Tavily + uploaded decks) feeds a single-call Gemini Pro generator. Core rule: the writer never sees the raw corpus — only user-verified facts.
- Faster first-pass memo prep
- ~24×
- Memo sections, single-call generation
- 12
- Used by BHI partners on every deal cycle
- Daily
Book tagging for retail ad selection
GPT-5-mini grounded on SerpAPI search. K-means surfaced six demand archetypes; HDBSCAN sub-clustering caught a hidden 5.28× ROAS pocket K-means averaged out; SHAP showed which tags actually moved performance.
- Books tagged in production
- ~13K
- ROAS pocket (n = 12) via HDBSCAN
- 5.28×
- Candidate ad titles surfaced
- 189
Open Source
ukraine-missile-tracking
Live at www.trackingrockets.com. 99,400+ Russian missiles and drones tracked since 2022-09-29 — 72.6% interception rate, weekly attack volume, defense efficiency, and weather-correlation analysis. Bilingual EN/UK. Personal civic project — extension of decade-long support for Ukraine's defense effort.
Chatbot-for-Amazon
Multimodal RAG over Amazon listings — CLIP image embeddings + GPT-4V, with a real evaluation harness for retrieval quality.
finetuning
Mistral-7B QLoRA fine-tune with 4-bit quantization. Reports BLEU 0.51 / ROUGE-L 0.63 against the base model on the eval split.
Modeling-Cosmic-Explosions
Code repository for a first-author MNRAS paper — "Cosmic Hazard Forecast: Rates of Near-Earth Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts" (Sovgut, Krishnan, Trauth, Fields). Axisymmetric Galactic-disk model + Iron-60 isotope evidence. Headline result: long GRBs and core-collapse supernovae are credible candidates for past terrestrial mass extinctions.
Experience
── Education
University of Chicago
MS, Applied Data Science
4.0 GPA
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
BS, Astronomy & Physics
3.5 GPA · Honorary List
── Roles
Bertelsmann Future Leaders Program
Sole engineer · BMG · BHI · PRH- Built production ML and AI products across three Bertelsmann subsidiaries — sole engineer on each, owning stakeholder discovery, architecture, build, and roll-out.
- BMG: ML pricing pipeline for sync licensing — ~78% MAE reduction, projected $7M+ annual uplift. Shipped as a FastMCP server with Shapley-value explanations, alongside four other MCP tools the licensing team uses in their internal AI chat.
- BHI: integrated AI ops stack + investment memo writer for the partner team — full stack designed and shipped solo in roughly one month; used daily by partners on every deal cycle.
- PRH: book-tagging pipeline for retail ad selection — gathered new data and successfully defended a year-old initiative to the Head of Data Science within a month.
University of Chicago — Graduate Projects
Three end-to-end AI products- Global-IQ agentic AI assistant — replaced a legacy form calculator with an MCP-integrated frontend for personalised global-mobility recommendations.
- UChicago Data Science RAG chatbot — scraped program content into transformer embeddings stored in a vector DB; GPT-4 served via a Chainlit UI.
- Multimodal e-commerce chatbot — CLIP image embeddings + LLM identify products from photos and answer follow-up questions; published on GitHub as Chatbot-for-Amazon.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Computational Astrophysics Engineer- Modelled near-Earth supernova and gamma-ray-burst rates; improved baseline model accuracy by ~50%.
- First author on the resulting paper — “Cosmic Hazard Forecast: Rates of Near-Earth Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts” (Sovgut, Krishnan, Trauth, Fields), published in MNRAS.
- Selected from 800+ undergraduates to present at the Illinois State Capitol (Capitol Scholars Research Award).
Main Astronomical Observatory, NAS Ukraine
Data Analyst & Observatory Operator- Automated satellite-tracking data ingestion and cleaning, cutting observation prep by 30%.
- Analysed 300+ satellite observations for an international scientific consortium contributing to satellite-orbit study.
- Co-presented a poster at an international science conference in Stuttgart, Germany.
Languages & Skills
── Languages
- English
- Fluent
- Spanish
- Fluent
- Russian
- Fluent
- Ukrainian
- Fluent
- Portuguese
- Intermediate
── Production-grade tools
Pluto Academy
A non-profit online physics school
I've run for five years.
I founded Pluto Academy to make university-level math, physics, and astronomy accessible to students who otherwise wouldn't see it. Five years in, it's a small but real institution: a recorded curriculum and a long list of students who've gone on to STEM degrees.
It's the longest-running thing I've built — and the clearest signal of how I work when no one is asking me to.
- Students taught
- 1,000+
- Original lessons
- 70+
- Hours of curated video
- 8+
- 5-star satisfaction
- 99%
Contact
Get in touch.
Email is the fastest channel.