Backend Engineer / Tech Lead at Yandex
Daniil
Zhilkin
Council Member
Daniil Zhilkin is a backend engineer and tech lead with more than five years of production experience, specializing in AI-driven voice assistant systems and agentic tooling for software development automation.
Since February 2024, Daniil Zhilkin has served as Backend Engineer and Tech Lead for the in-car voice assistant at Yandex, one of the largest technology companies in Europe. In this role, he owns the full backend of an assistant that ships in production vehicles, making it one of a small number of in-car voice assistants deployed at scale. His responsibilities span dialogue scenario development, intent understanding, and grammar-based NLU tooling, with core implementation work carried out in C++ and Python. He designs and manages integrations directly with automotive manufacturers, keeping services stable under high load and within the strict latency and on-device constraints of the in-car environment. He also ships backend features across the broader Alice device family, which includes smart speakers, connected TVs, and other consumer hardware. Beyond the assistant itself, Daniil Zhilkin built and deployed an LLM agent that automates routine engineering work end to end: the system generates production code, validates it against a held-out evaluation set as well as the repository's build pipeline and test suite, and opens a pull request that includes an honest map of its own weak spots. Engineering tasks that previously required a full day now complete in approximately one hour. He also serves as a technical interviewer at Yandex, assessing candidates on algorithms, backend fundamentals, and code quality, and has filled that role for two consecutive years at Young Con. He additionally mentors interns, guiding their onboarding, reviewing their code, and supporting their day-to-day work.
Since February 2024, Daniil Zhilkin has served as Backend Engineer and Tech Lead for the in-car voice assistant at Yandex, one of the largest technology companies in Europe. In this role, he owns the full backend of an assistant that ships in production vehicles, making it one of a small number of in-car voice assistants deployed at scale. His responsibilities span dialogue scenario development, intent understanding, and grammar-based NLU tooling, with core implementation work carried out in C++ and Python. He designs and manages integrations directly with automotive manufacturers, keeping services stable under high load and within the strict latency and on-device constraints of the in-car environment. He also ships backend features across the broader Alice device family, which includes smart speakers, connected TVs, and other consumer hardware. Beyond the assistant itself, Daniil Zhilkin built and deployed an LLM agent that automates routine engineering work end to end: the system generates production code, validates it against a held-out evaluation set as well as the repository's build pipeline and test suite, and opens a pull request that includes an honest map of its own weak spots. Engineering tasks that previously required a full day now complete in approximately one hour. He also serves as a technical interviewer at Yandex, assessing candidates on algorithms, backend fundamentals, and code quality, and has filled that role for two consecutive years at Young Con. He additionally mentors interns, guiding their onboarding, reviewing their code, and supporting their day-to-day work.
From November 2021 to January 2024, Daniil Zhilkin worked as a Backend Engineer with Why Not (whynotrp.ru), a multiplayer online game platform, under an independent contract arrangement. He designed and implemented the majority of the platform's backend subsystems in TypeScript from scratch, bringing the project to launch readiness. His contributions included architecting the MariaDB data layer using Sequelize, designing JSON-RPC APIs for game interfaces, and establishing real-time data exchange across all game servers via WebSocket. He also created shared internal tooling adopted by the entire team across the codebase and led the refactoring and decomposition of legacy code into maintainable modules.
Earlier in his career, Daniil Zhilkin worked as a Backend Developer at Horizon RP from June 2019 to February 2020, where he developed and tested backend modules and APIs in JavaScript for a multiplayer online game platform.
Daniil Zhilkin holds a Diploma in Information Systems and Programming with a specialization in Software Development from Moscow Automobile and Road College (MADK), completed in 2021. He supplemented this with a Java Developer course through JavaRush in 2023.
His technical expertise spans TypeScript, Python, C++, Java, and Kotlin, with backend work across Node.js and the Spring Framework, REST APIs, JSON-RPC, and WebSocket. He works with MariaDB and MySQL via Sequelize, and brings hands-on experience in LLM agent design and evaluation, high-load system architecture, automated testing with Pytest, and technical interviewing.
Earlier in his career, Daniil Zhilkin worked as a Backend Developer at Horizon RP from June 2019 to February 2020, where he developed and tested backend modules and APIs in JavaScript for a multiplayer online game platform.
Daniil Zhilkin holds a Diploma in Information Systems and Programming with a specialization in Software Development from Moscow Automobile and Road College (MADK), completed in 2021. He supplemented this with a Java Developer course through JavaRush in 2023.
His technical expertise spans TypeScript, Python, C++, Java, and Kotlin, with backend work across Node.js and the Spring Framework, REST APIs, JSON-RPC, and WebSocket. He works with MariaDB and MySQL via Sequelize, and brings hands-on experience in LLM agent design and evaluation, high-load system architecture, automated testing with Pytest, and technical interviewing.