About
Bastian Kuberek
Bastian is a senior full-stack engineer in New York who builds AI and data systems end-to-end. He came to it the long way — Brazil, an upholstery shop, a samba band, then the web — and it shows: he makes things meant to be used hard and to last.
New York, NY · English, Portuguese, Spanish — conversational Italian, learning Turkish
He arrived from Brazil around 2003 and spent his first New York years working with his hands — upholstery for interior-design and automotive projects out in East Hampton — and playing in a Brazilian samba band that gigged across Long Island. The web came sideways, in 2007, with a webmaster job at an arts magazine: he learned the trade on the job, rebuilt the magazine's sites with open-source tools, and found that code scratched the same itch as the workshop — material, tools, and the satisfaction of a thing built properly.
Career
The journey
The short version — the résumé has the long one.
A few years of building sites for New York magazines and agencies followed, and in 2011 he landed at Spotify. He stayed twelve and a half years, across five very different teams — analytics, internal systems, data, podcasts — five jobs at one address, and a rare kind of education: stay long enough and your own architecture decisions come back to find you, so you learn to make the kind you can live with.
In 2024 he traded the big company for a small one — AppliedXL, a clinical-trials data-intelligence startup — and spent two years building AI systems end-to-end: document and LLM pipelines, agent platforms, the product on top, the cloud underneath. At that size there's nowhere to hide and everything to learn, and it suited him; he wrote the specs, shipped the systems, and sat up with them at night when they misbehaved.
AppliedXL
2024 – 2026Senior Software Engineer, Full-stack
AI and data systems end-to-end: pipelines, agent platforms, product surfaces, and the AWS infrastructure underneath.
Spotify
2011 – 2024Software Engineer → Senior Engineer, across five teams
Five teams in twelve and a half years: dashboards, identity, a knowledge graph, and podcast infrastructure.
Now
Still making things
Which brings him to now: still in New York two decades on, married to a Turkish woman and studying Turkish, with grown kids and family spread all over the world. The samba band is gone but the music isn't, and the upholstery shop has become a home workshop — five sewing machines, a homelab in the corner. He rides a motorcycle through the city, climbs and camps when the weather cooperates, and keeps making things, digital and physical. The tools change; the itch doesn't.
- Motorcycles
- Climbing & camping
- Music
- Sewing & making
- Homelab
Capabilities
What he works with
AI/LLM and data systems are the center of gravity; the rest is what it takes to run them in production.
AI / LLM & Agents
Data & Pipelines
Backend
Frontend
Infra / DevOps
Databases
Open to senior/staff full-stack, AI-engineering, and platform roles — and to select project work where someone needs a system built and running, not just designed.