00 / 08
I'm Kirill, a frontend and product engineer based in Tokyo.
[WRITE: a short personal reason for approaching Evil Martians. Be specific about the work and approach that interest you.]
This is a letter in nine short chapters. Each one answers a part of your application brief, and the chapter index on the right (or at the bottom on a phone) takes you straight to any of them. There is also a plain-text version of the same letter.
01
Selected interface work
The first example is the page you are reading. I built it for this application, so every decision in it is mine and you can inspect all of it: the source, the rendered result and the way it behaves on a phone, with a keyboard or with motion turned off.
[DRAFT: The background is a canvas drawn at a quarter of the screen resolution (a third on phones) and scaled up with nearest-neighbour sampling, so the ordered dither reads as deliberate pixels rather than noise. It redraws only when its parameters change. The parameters come from which chapter is on screen and how far through it the reader is, so reordering a chapter or doubling its length does not break the composition.]
[DRAFT: Literata is a variable font with an optical size axis. The title is set at the 72 point optical size, where hairlines thin out and the italic gains contrast, and body paragraphs at 14, where strokes are sturdier. One family does both jobs. As the reader scrolls past the cover, the title turns on a shallow cylinder. Paragraphs never move.]
[DRAFT: The chapter index is generated from the same Markdown files as the chapters, the plain-text view and the email. The current chapter is derived from the section positions on each scroll frame and mirrored in the URL hash with replaceState, so no history entries pile up and the back button still leaves the site in one step.]
[DRAFT: The system reduced-motion setting is respected, and there is also a visible switch. With motion off, every view is a finished composition rather than a paused one: the sky jumps to its final state for that chapter instead of tweening.]
[WRITE: two or three details worth looking closely at. The annotations on the cover above are a draft written from the implementation; keep the ones you would defend in an interview and rewrite them in your own words.]
[WRITE: one trade-off or thing you would now improve.]
[WRITE: a sentence on what public material exists from earlier products and what it can and cannot show.]
[ASSET: a screenshot or short recording of Spawn Studio's grid view]
Spawn Studio is a workbench for generating with AI in bulk: rows are inputs, columns are a model plus an instruction, and every cell holds a result. [WRITE: the interaction or workflow you want them to look at, and your exact responsibility.]
[ASSET: a legacy screenshot of the Find AI search interface, 2024]
[WRITE: what the Find AI screenshots show, what you were responsible for, and one detail worth a closer look. Only screenshots you actually have.]
02
Experience and origins
My work has moved between web products, HCI research, consulting and AI software.
I'm Russian, based in Tokyo, and have spent the past several years working in English-speaking environments. Happy to communicate in either language.
[WRITE: how you came to frontend work and the part of software that holds your interest.]
Most recently, I worked across a SvelteKit frontend and Go services as an AI product changed through several iterations. The product began as Find AI, a search over about five million people, company and investor records, and became Chatsheet AI, a collaborative product for developing and evaluating LLM applications. I owned the frontend through that change and worked on the Go services, APIs and data models behind it.
[WRITE: a specific example of planning, shipping or communicating in an English-speaking environment.]
[WRITE: a decision you owned, including the constraint and what happened.]
Before that, I spent six years at Keio University in Tokyo, first as a doctoral student and then as a postdoctoral researcher in human-computer interaction. My first programming jobs were in web development in Russia, building Rails applications for startups.
03
A consultancy story
At Altera Consulting, I led product design for Cartier Japan's internal retail operations platform, working with management and retail users through implementation and QA.
[WRITE: a particular situation with differing needs or an unclear requirement.]
[WRITE: what you learned directly from the people doing the work.]
[WRITE: the decision or conversation that changed the direction.]
[WRITE: what you personally did, the trade-off and the actual result.]
04
UI influences
[APP NAME]: [WRITE: a precise observation about an interface you have actually inspected, and why it matters to you.]
[ASSET: optional screenshot, clearly attributed to the app's maker] [ATTRIBUTION: app name and maker]
05
What interests me next
[WRITE: the software development you are actually excited about, the limitation it removes and something you want to try with it.]
06
AI in my work
In my recent role, I developed a collaborative LLM development and evaluation product, including model comparison, structured outputs, evaluations and prompt optimisation. That is what the product did. How I use these tools myself is a separate question.
[WRITE: how you use assistants or models during actual engineering work.]
[WRITE: the context and constraints you provide, how you inspect results and where you retain decisions.]
[WRITE: an example of a failure you detected and how you corrected or contained it.]
[WRITE: any relevant ML research or product use you want to explain.]
07
Research and community
At Keio, I designed, built and evaluated interactive systems across wearables, sensing, eye tracking, haptics and mixed reality. I co-authored more than 15 peer-reviewed publications, nine as first author, with work presented at venues including CHI, SIGGRAPH, MobileHCI and IEEE VR.
I also co-organised Augmented Humans 2022 and led the Eyewear Computing workshop at UbiComp / ISWC 2021.
The full publication list and project write-ups are on my research site. My code is on GitHub as jazzjackrabbit.
08
Location and contact
Based in Tokyo, Japan.
[CONFIRM: work arrangement and a realistic Pacific-time overlap. The vacancy asks for at least three hours of overlap with Pacific Time; state what you can actually offer.]
[CONFIRM: preferred contact address. The homepage shows ragozin@hey.com and the CV shows ragozinkirill@gmail.com.]
[OPTIONAL: closing sentence.]
If this reads like someone you would want to talk to, write to me.
ragozin@hey.com [CONFIRM: address]
Kirill Ragozin · Tokyo, Japan · 35.68N 139.65E