Nikita Groshin

I'm Nikita Groshin. I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Indeed in Seattle, where I've been since April 2022. Before that, five years at Amazon — most of it on Alexa Connect Kit, the platform that lets third-party device makers put Alexa in their hardware without running their own cloud.

Before Amazon I was in Chicago — tech lead on the Groupon Interface team, owning the consumer web across 26 country sites. And before Chicago I was in Hanoi, running frontend and tooling at CocCoc, Vietnam's home-grown search engine and browser — a Russian-founded attempt to out-localize Google on its own turf. I started the career in St. Petersburg in 2007.

Alongside the day job I write essays — mostly on Medium, soon migrating here — about the things I actually build. AI experiments that leak something true about the tools, infrastructure notes for when the defaults stop working, and the occasional Sunday-afternoon Roblox game with my daughter.

Current open-source focus: Sverklo — a local-first MCP server that gives AI coding agents structural understanding of a codebase instead of letting them re-grep the same files every turn.

I also ship satirical artifacts from time to time. An AI-generated shoegaze band with a manifesto it did not write (Orphaned Threads). A Russian-to-JavaScript transpiler wrapped in a straight-faced digital-sovereignty landing page (rjs.su). And back in 2014 I spent a Saturday morning building Часы Пескова — a site that indexed the ruble cost of a Kremlin spokesman's watch collection against the state of the Russian economy. Radio Svoboda ran the interview. The joke aged better than the ruble.

I speak Russian, English, and French. I read more than I ship. This site is legible to humans and to the machines indexing it — both audiences welcome.