Senior Software Engineer

Vladimir Chopine

Full-Stack Development & AI-Native Engineering

Senior engineer with a decade of technical leadership at Hughes Network Systems, building agentic AI systems daily with Claude Code and Cursor — backed by 30 years shipping production software.

Salt Lake City, UT metro · Open to remote or relocation
Vladimir Chopine
10
Years Technical Leadership @ Hughes
850+
GitHub Stars, 29 Repos
B.S.
Computer Science
MCSD
Certified
30+
Years Shipping Production Software

Summary

For the last decade I've been a senior engineer and technical lead at Hughes Network Systems — architecting systems, reviewing code, and mentoring more than ten engineers, several of whom were promoted into senior roles. I've also driven company-wide adoption of AI agentic programming there — the only engineer championing it in my group, with influence reaching across the organization, contributing to a roughly 10x productivity increase for the teams that adopted it. That sits at the top of 30 years writing production software: Ruby on Rails, Angular, React, TypeScript, Node.js, and AWS, mostly at scale inside established engineering teams.

Alongside that, I build agentic AI systems by hand: a security architecture for swarm robotics, a SaaS app shipped end-to-end with Claude Code and Cursor, and generative-AI pipelines trained on custom models. I didn't pick up AI tools last year — I've been building and teaching agentic workflows to a technical audience for years.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer — Hughes Network Systems
Aug 2014 – Present
Advanced network and software solutions for employee training, management systems, and consumer-facing media signage. Greater Salt Lake City Area.
  • Led full-stack development using Ruby on Rails, Angular, React, TypeScript, and Node.js, delivering enterprise web applications at scale.
  • Served as technical lead on a small engineering team — owned architecture decisions, code review, and delivery.
  • Mentored 10+ engineers over the course of the role; several promoted into senior positions.
  • Deployed and operated services on AWS using Docker and Kubernetes, including CI/CD pipelines.
  • Championed adoption of AI agentic programming company-wide — the only engineer driving it in the group, with influence reaching across the organization — contributing to a roughly 10x productivity increase for teams that adopted it.
Founder & Technical Lead — GeekatPlay Studio
Aug 2001 – Present
Digital production and engineering lab spanning AI tooling, embedded systems, and technical education. Salt Lake City, UT.
  • Designed and built HiveLink, a self-healing swarm-robotics mesh network with a full federated security architecture.
  • Maintain 29 public GitHub repositories (850+ stars) covering AI tooling, ComfyUI workflows, and automation scripts.
  • Built and operate a sponsor management automation system handling 48 active deals end to end.
  • Teach software engineering and generative AI workflows to a technical audience of 96,000+; author of two technical books (Focal Press).
Earlier Experience: Senior UI Developer, Softwise (2009–2014) · Senior Interactive Technologist, Merit Medical Systems (2007–2009) · Senior UI Developer & Art Director, iCentris (2005–2007) · Database Manager & Web Admin, Linux Networx (2001–2005) · Lead Senior Interactive Technologist, Euro RSCG/DSW Partners (1999–2001) · Software Developer & Systems Analyst, Mitsubishi Silicon America (1997–1999) · Programmer & DBA, Spirit Mountain Casino (1994–1997) — full-stack web and enterprise development across financial services, healthcare, advertising, semiconductor, and gaming industries.

Featured Projects

Independent engineering work, built and shipped outside of day-job employment.

HiveLink / Ash-Mesh

Swarm-robotics security architecture
  • Self-healing mesh network for swarm robotics on ESP32-class hardware, LoRa, and MQTT — designed to detect and quarantine compromised drones without human intervention.
  • Formal PRD, TRD, and Hardware BOM / Comms Trade Study documentation.
  • Quarantine state machine with 7 states (UNKNOWN, TRUSTED, SUSPECT, QUARANTINED, HONEYPOT, BLOCKED, RELEASED), tunable suspicion scoring, and recovery flows keyed to hardware root-of-trust.
  • Federated trust-list format, interop beacon format, and a decoy-data generator using canary tokens. Architecture is explicitly defensive by design — offensive/reflashing capability was deliberately declined.
ESP32LoRaMQTT AEADMesh NetworkingSystems Security

TripCraft

SaaS app built end-to-end with agentic coding tools
  • A Next.js/Tailwind/Vercel SaaS application built live, end-to-end, using Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Kiro, Continue.dev, and Ollama.
  • Serves as the flagship demo project for an in-production course on agentic engineering workflows and tool orchestration.
  • Demonstrates production-grade output from AI-native development practices, not just prototyping.
Next.jsTailwind CSSVercel Claude CodeCursor

Image Express

Open-source AI-native design platform
  • An open-source design platform (imageexpress.xyz) orchestrating multiple generative image models in a single creative workspace.
  • Owned solo end-to-end — architecture, interface, and generative pipeline integration — iterating directly against real usage.
Generative AIOpen SourceDesign Tooling

ComfyUI Generative Pipelines

Custom generative-AI pipelines for production creative work
  • Custom ComfyUI workflows for portrait restoration and multi-view character generation.
  • Trains custom LoRA and VLM models fine-tuned for specific production tasks.
ComfyUILoRAStable DiffusionModel Training

Skills

Languages
JavaScript / TypeScriptPythonRuby JavaC#SQLPHP
Frontend
ReactAngularHTML/CSSBootstrap
Backend
Node.jsRuby on RailsASP.NET MVC REST APIsMicroservices
Data
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBRedisMSSQL
Cloud / DevOps
AWSDockerKubernetesCI/CDGitHub Actions
AI / LLM
LangGraphLangChainMCPn8n OpenAI APIAnthropic APIRAGPineconeWeaviate
AI Dev Tools (Daily Use)
Claude CodeCursorGitHub Copilot KiroContinue.devOllama
Hardware / IoT
ESP32LoRaMQTTMesh NetworkingAEAD Security

Credentials

SIGGRAPH
Speaker
2 Books
Focal Press
B.S.
Computer Science
MCSD
Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer

Teaching & Community

Alongside full-time engineering roles, I've spent 20 years building a technical education platform: 3,000+ tutorials, a YouTube audience of 96,000+ across two channels, and community platforms including a Discord server and a local Adobe user group.

It runs largely on its own at this point — a body of work I maintain, not a daily time commitment that competes with a full-time role.