Nikita Groshin. Principal engineer at Indeed. Shipped CocCoc in Hanoi, Alexa Connect Kit at Amazon in Seattle, and Groupon across twenty-six countries. Writing essays on the things I actually build.
“More trades means more fee drag, more slippage, and more opportunities to be wrong. The edge, if it exists, needs to be large enough to survive the friction.”
Recent essays
- 01202604-19Infrastructure · 11 min · medium
I Built 11 Trading Bots, Killed 9, and All I Got Was This $13 Loss
Eleven bots. $95 in starting capital. Nine of them got killed along the way, two limped through, and the whole exercise netted a $13 loss. A postmortem on architecture, slippage, and the specific hubris of assuming edge exists where it does not.
read on mediumEleven receipts. Two survivors. Hubris was the product. - 02202604-01AI experiments · 20 min · medium
The Algorithmic Gaze: Why I Outsourced My Melancholy to a Server Farm in Northern Virginia
Kevin Shields spent two years and $500,000 chasing a guitar sound. I generated a shoegaze album in forty-two seconds while eating a microwave burrito. A field report from Post-Effort Shoegaze.
read on mediumWritten on a Sunday, while a Fender lay untouched on the couch. - 03202603-03Infrastructure · 10 min · medium
The Ghost in the Machine: Setting Up a VLESS + Reality VPN for Perfect Stealth
WireGuard and OpenVPN are cooked the moment DPI sees them. Here is how to stand up VLESS + TCP + Reality + XTLS-Vision so your traffic is indistinguishable from a boring HTTPS visit to a real site.
read on mediumFull config in the piece. Tested from three hostile networks. - 04202601-26Creative coding · 13 min · medium
Roblox vibe coding
My 11-year-old wanted floating islands, gravity flips, and a leaderboard to flex on her squad. Instead of a weekend of Luau pain, we shipped it with Google Antigravity — and watched plays climb from zero to hundreds overnight.
read on mediumCo-authored, loosely, with an excited 5th-grader. - 05202304-17Meta · 8 min · medium
Generating websites content with AI
One evening, four directory sites, a small API bill, and an open question: how does Google actually treat hybrid human-and-machine content? A receipt, not a pitch.
read on mediumFrom the archive. Still holds up; still unresolved.
The ledger
- 2022 — now●IndeedPrincipal Software Engineer · SeattleTop IC tier at a top-5 global jobs marketplace./10
- 2017 — 2022AmazonSenior SDE · SeattleAlexa Connect Kit. Shipped third-party Alexa integration at scale./09
- 2015 — 2017GrouponTech Lead · ChicagoLed the consumer web surface across 26 country sites./08
- 2013 — 2015OpticsPlanetSoftware Engineer · ChicagoFirst landing in the US after Hanoi./07
- 2011 — 2013CocCocHead of Frontend & Tools · HanoiRussian-founded search engine challenging Google in Vietnam./06
Selected work
Indeed
Principal IC on consumer-scale jobs infrastructure.
Sverklo
Local-first code intelligence for Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Drills your repo into a real symbol graph — hybrid BM25 + ONNX embeddings + PageRank, blast-radius analysis, diff-aware PR review with per-file risk scoring, and bi-temporal memory pinned to git commits. MIT-licensed, no cloud upload.
Alexa Connect Kit
Core contributor on ACK — lets device makers ship Alexa hardware without running their own cloud or firmware stack.
CocCoc
Ran frontend, tooling, and the search department at Vietnam's home-grown challenger to Google.
Groupon Interface
Led Groupon Interface — the consumer web surface across 26 country sites. Some of the highest traffic on the open e-commerce web.
Orphaned Threads
A shoegaze band that does not exist, with a manifesto it did not write, and a server farm in Northern Virginia that agreed to feel sad on my behalf.
Часы Пескова / Peskov's Clocks
A Saturday-morning civic-tech artifact indexing the ruble value of Dmitry Peskov's alleged $620k watch collection. Picked up by Radio Svoboda.
Bio, abridged
Principal Software Engineer at Indeed since 2022. Previously Senior SDE at Amazon on Alexa Connect Kit, Tech Lead at Groupon across 26 countries, and Head of Frontend & Tools at CocCoc, the Vietnamese search engine challenging Google. Eighteen years, four cities, three languages.
I write about the things I actually build. A shoegaze album generated in forty-two seconds. A VPN that walks through the wall. A Roblox game shipped with an excited fifth-grader. I try not to publish unless there is a working artifact behind the paragraph.
NAME: Nikita Groshin. ROLE: principal-software-engineer. EMPLOYER: indeed.com. LOCATION: seattle, wa. SPEAKS: ru, en, fr. SHIPS: search, voice, consumer-web, developer-tooling, satire. HIRING-TRAJECTORY: actively building.
Open channel
Write to me. Hiring, consulting, advising, or arguing about Loveless — all fine.