open to interesting problems

Ivan Nikolov

AI / ML Engineer — LLMs · RAG · agentic systems

I build production LLM systems — agentic pipelines, retrieval and multilingual NLP. Currently Team Lead / AI Engineer at Factum AI, shipping a multilingual legal chatbot across 15+ European markets.

1stplace · AI Agents ’23
7engineers mentored
1,199songs · BSc thesis

// my work — drag to spin it, or click a node to jump to the details below

IN
Ivan Nikolov

Experience

Factum AI Jan 2026 – present
Team Lead · AI / Backend

Lead engineering for a multilingual multi-agent legal chatbot — live in Macedonia & Serbia, with 15+ markets operational. I own technical direction across agentic flows, data ingestion, web scraping, Celery async and the relational/non-relational database layer, and mentor 7 junior engineers.

factum.law
GPT Protocol Apr 2024 – Feb 2025
Software Engineer

Backend for a decentralized GPU compute marketplace (CTO: Prof. Panche Ribarski). Designed an async resource-reallocation algorithm scheduling LLM workloads across a distributed machine pool, served open models via vLLM in per-model Docker images, built the frontend, and wired Solidity smart contracts + the native token into payments and metering.

gptprotocol.org
MANU Sep 2024 – May 2025
Research Intern

Built a chatbot for Alzheimer’s researchers powered by hybrid RAG (BM25 + transformer-based dense retrieval) over tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers and a Neo4j knowledge graph — part of MANU’s diagnosis-support project under Prof. Igor Mishkovski.

manu.edu.mk

Research, talks & awards

Thesis BSc · Dec 2025
LLMs for Macedonian

“On the Capabilities of LLMs for Style Detection and Lyric Generation in the Macedonian Language.” A custom dataset of 36 authors and 1,199 songs, 18 synthetic datasets across style-transfer techniques — 80% F1 on authorship over generated text, 70% over real poetry. Supervised by Prof. Sonja Gievska & Prof. Martina Toshevska; later guest-lectured the FCSE NLP course on it.

RoboMak ’23 Award · May 2023
1st place · AI Agents

Member of Team Polaris — developed AI agents that outperformed the field in the multi-agent challenge at RoboMak 2023 (IEEE Macedonia), taking 1st place in the AI Agents category.

read the writeup

Outside work

Poetry outside work
Published poet

Published Macedonian-language poet, with readings at literary festivals across Macedonia. Half-seriously, the reason I got into language models in the first place — and the motivation behind my thesis.

## about

I’m an AI/ML engineer based in Macedonia. Most of my work lives where language models meet real systems — agentic flows, retrieval (BM25 + dense), knowledge graphs, and the unglamorous backend that keeps them running in production.

Before Factum I built backend for a decentralized GPU compute marketplace and a hybrid-RAG research assistant at MANU. I also write Macedonian poetry — which, half-seriously, is what pulled me into language models: my BSc thesis was on LLMs for style detection and poetry generation in low-resource Macedonian.

education BSc Computer Science — FCSE, Skopje (2021–2025)
languages English & Macedonian (native) · Serbocroatian, Bulgarian (reading) · French (basic)
based in Skopje / Bitola, Macedonia

## skills

// basalt columns — move your mouse across to raise them

LLM Systems
Agentic AI
RAG
Knowledge Graphs
Multi-Agent
Prompt Eng.
Evals
System Design
Ingestion Pipelines
Async Tasks
Distributed Systems
Web Scraping
Scalability
vLLM
Bedrock
Gemini
Agent SDK
FastAPI
Celery
Redis
Postgres
Neo4j
Elastic
Docker
Leadership
Mentoring