About

Hi, I'm Vlad

Vlad Brakalo - senior AI engineer

I'm a senior AI engineer with 6+ years in IT. For 2+ of those years I was on the core team at Sellify AI - one of its first technical hires, working directly with the co-founder. Sellify is a vertical SaaS selling outcome-priced AI sales and customer-support agents to US pest control operators, some of them PCT-100 companies.

I built features competitors announced but never shipped, plus the legacy-CRM integration that became Sellify's moat. Through the platform, Ninefold brought in $620k in new sales and 1,100 new accounts, HomeTeam added $1M+ in new revenue in a single month, and at Enviroguard the AI agent sold 769 accounts in a year, roughly twice the top human rep.

Sellify's founder had co-owned Fox Pest before its $350M exit to Rollins in 2023. He left me a testimonial.

Before AI I spent years in frontend and open source - I co-maintain vscode-snippet, a VS Code extension that 150,000+ people have downloaded.

For the past 1.5+ years I've also been the contract senior AI engineer for a recruitment-AI SaaS, working directly with the founder. I operationalized every project with an end-to-end evals system, so the client's internal team can maintain and extend it without firefighting - and without needing me.

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5.0 Top Rated Plus on Upwork (top 3%)
6+ yrs in software
2 yrs On the core team, Sellify AI 150K+ VS Code extension downloads

Also IBM certified in Generative AI for Business Leaders & Executives and AI Agents with RAG.

Find me elsewhere: LinkedIn · YouTube · GitHub · X · Medium · Upwork · F6S · Skool · Product Hunt · DevPost.

How I Got Here

From C programs to shipping production AI

In 2020 I was writing C programs at university. The first-semester exam was to write a linked list in C on paper - if I typed it into a computer, it had to run. I scored 80 out of 100 because I forgot to clean up malloc.

In 2021 I thought I'd be a game dev. I started building games in C++ with SFML (like this one), coding by hand - aka, manually creating training datasets for future AI coding agents. Turns out that skill was hard to market.

I tried to switch to C# and Unity, but my laptop had 2GB of RAM and ran Windows 7 - it could only run Unity 5 and Visual Studio 2012. So I gave up on games and moved to frontend engineering in 2022.

Around that time I got into open source. I'm a co-maintainer of vscode-snippet, a VS Code extension with 150,000+ downloads. I also sent a few bigger PRs to Logux, a JavaScript framework for offline-first sync (CRDTs, real-time updates, optimistic UI).

In 2023 I joined the core team at Sellify AI, a vertical SaaS for pest control companies. We built AI sales and customer support agents tied straight into their CRMs. One of the customers landed $620k in new sales and 1,100 new accounts from the AI sales system. The CEO had also been a co-owner of Fox Pest, which had a $350M exit to Rollins in 2023 - so the bar for "this has to actually work in production" was high.

Now I do that for other founders. I embed with B2B SaaS companies and ship the AI feature into their product - the demo is the easy part, my job is the version that survives once paying customers get their hands on it, with evals in CI and a handoff their own team runs.

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