Illya Bakurov
Co-founder, CTO at Stella Foster
Los Angeles, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIllya Bakurov is a product-focused engineering leader and founder with 11 years building consumer mobile experiences and AI-enabled products, currently serving as Co-founder and CTO of Stella Foster in Los Angeles. He led camera, creative tools, and memories teams at Snap—shipping features used by hundreds of millions daily such as Auto-Caption, Voice Over, and a Preview Filter Carousel that materially increased engagement. Prior to Snap he co-founded Story Star, where he led development of 20+ iOS and web apps including a product acquired and integrated into Snapchat, and has led fintech and retail engineering efforts for enterprise clients. Illya blends hands-on Swift/Objective-C/SwiftUI engineering with product design and prototyping expertise (Figma, Origami, Protopie), and mentors small teams to turn experiments into widely used features. His background in computational mathematics and postgraduate finance studies gives him a rare mix of quantitative rigor and product intuition, now applied to consumer AI productization.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) Computational and Applied Mathematics, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.) Computational and Applied Mathematics at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla AcademyPost-Graduate Certificate Financial Analysis & Investment Management, Post-Graduate Certificate Financial Analysis & Investment Management at University of TorontoMaster's of Computer Science Computer Science, Master's of Computer Science Computer Science at Brock University
English, Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish
Stackoverflow
484reputation
23kreached
6answers
2questions
Github Skills (58)
objective-c10
ios10
swift10
macos10
xcode9
cocoapods9
carthage8
uiview8
uicollectionview8
custom-keyboard8
uiviewcontroller7
instagram7
animated7
refresh7
audio7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
ibakurov/MultiColumnLayout
Feb 2018 - May 2019
Contributions:7 releases, 22 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 3 months
ibakurov/Memebox-TweetsUI
Apr 2019 - May 2019
Contributions:12 releases, 8 pushes, 1 branch in 24 days
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