Head of LLM Tech Unit Development

Analytical Platform Team

AI Lab Cluster

Location Moscow, remote work

In our work, we set ambitious goals and don't stop at what we've achieved. Therefore, it's crucial for us that every member of the large Avito team shares the company culture. The Manifest, which gathers our main guidelines — mission, values, work principles — helps to immerse ourselves in it.

About the Team

Our team trains its own foundational LLMs and integrates them into Avito's business scenarios. The team's goal is to provide products with models that meet the requirements for response quality and application cost.

We adapt open-source solutions for the Russian language and Avito's domain specifics using continual pre-training and tokenizer replacement. To develop models, the team researches new methods and pipelines, including RL and synthetic data, and also works with datasets. We hold regular LLM seminars where we discuss articles and AI trends.

The team's technical focus is on building a scalable pipeline for LLM pre-training and fine-tuning, optimizing inference: working with modern engines, quantization, speculative decoding, and other acceleration methods, as well as developing LLM Gateway — a single entry point for working with internal and external LLMs.

• being responsible for GPU infrastructure for LLMs: from hardware to utilization;
• defining and implementing the LLM inference development strategy;
• optimizing LLM inference;
• defining the strategy for using external LLM providers and developing LLM Gateway;
• developing platforms for quality assessment, RAG, and LLM Gateway;
• being a reliable partner for DS UL;
• working with key metrics:
  • cost per token × model size;
  • utilization;
  • SLA;
  • LLM Gateway user satisfaction;
  • economic performance of LLMs

• expertise in GPU;
• experience working with Data Scientists in the field of LLM and inference optimization;
• understanding of how LLMs, the infrastructure around them, and model quality assessment work;
• experience in optimizing LLM inference;
• managed multiple teams, applied a systematic approach to management, and worked through leads and goals;
• led projects for stakeholders at the cluster lead and CEO levels;
• ability to translate complex technical topics into understandable language;
• understanding of DS tasks and ability to negotiate with teams;
• ability to assess situations and solve problems before they impact results

• extended healthcare coverage: voluntary medical insurance, life insurance, cancer insurance;
• psychological support services, as well as financial, legal, and healthy lifestyle consultations for you and your loved ones;
• corporate sports: group training sessions, wellbeing app;
• special offers from partners and discounts on Avito services: accommodation booking, promotion services, mortgage insurance;
• meal compensation;
• opportunity to develop in a strong team of leaders and help others grow;
• clear competency matrix with transparent expectations at all levels;
• unique cultural code and a strong expert community