Dennis Stanoev

Building reliable agents and AI products | Helping founders and teams innovate, build and scale products through hands-on consulting and development | Founder | Builder | CTO | fCTO

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

About

I’m a hands‑on builder who loves exploring fresh ideas and applying new tech in meaningful ways. I help founders and teams innovate, build and scale online products and platforms. Especially when clarity is lacking and results matter. → Building with early-stage founders going from idea to product and post-launch → Helping teams execute on innovation grants and R&D projects → Enabled 100+ direct, 3rd-party integrations (payments, reporting, pos, crm, loyalty, and more) → Delivered and scaled online platforms processing millions of transactions I believe that the best work comes from listening, simplifying, and building just enough to learn what works and enable iteration. Currently building: → smooth & reliable web and mobile experiences → AI products & agentic workflows → automated marketing, sales & operational pipelines 🧑‍💻 Check out my blog for practical insights about building AI-enabled products. 🤝 Connect/follow or ping me a DM - I'm always happy to chat about startups, product and tech.

Experience

  • Founder at Digital Grotto
    Jun 2021 - Present · 5 yrs 2 mos

    Helping businesses unlock new opportunities and innovate through software.

  • QikServe Limited (Greater Edinburgh Area)
    • Technical Architect
      Nov 2017 - Jun 2021 · 3 yrs 8 mos

      Responsible for the technology strategy across the company, while actively supporting every function of the business from pre-sales and product management to operations and support. Being directly involved in each of these areas allows me to inform a wholistic technology strategy for the business whose benefits can be realised across the organisation. Introduced a platform-oriented approach and transitioned from a monolithic into a micro-services oriented architecture. We developed and deployed a streaming data pipeline to support our data analytics, reporting and monitoring needs. Our strategy ensured that we were able to deploy and manage our applications and infrastructure at scale and with ease. Some of the notable technologies used: * AWS, Azure * Jenkins, Docker & Kubernetes * Terraform * Apache Kafka

    • Lead Engineer
      Apr 2015 - Nov 2017 · 2 yrs 8 mos

      Growing into the lead engineering role, my duties expanded to include the overall quality of the team's output throughout the full SDLC. I was also responsible for the recruitment process and on-boarding and mentoring of new hires.

    • Software Engineer
      Sep 2012 - Apr 2015 · 2 yrs 8 mos

      Joining the company as employee #4, I was directly responsible for maintaining and contributing across the entire suite of products, while also handling day-to-day operational issues. This included maintenance and feature enhancements to our guest-facing mobile and web channels while also improving on existing, and implementing new, integrations with our payment, POS and printer partners. Tech-wise I was directly contributing across our entire stack: * Native iOS * Native Android * Front-end web development using AngularJS which was the go-to front-end framework at the time * Backend Java, Spring-based API and CMS development * DB (predominantly MySQL) management

  • Application Developer at J.P. Morgan
    Jun 2011 - Sep 2012 · 1 yr 4 mos

    Worked on a test harness for one of the main in-house applications. The application seamlessly constructed XML messages from plain-text files written in an internal DSL, then sent those message to their corresponding Apache Qpid queues so they could be processed by the main application. The test harness ultimately validated and reported whether the correct, DSL-specified, database entries were created or amended as relevant by the main application.

  • Software Engineering Student Tutor & Mentor at The University of Edinburgh
    Dec 2009 - Jun 2011 · 1 yr 7 mos

    Responsible for mentoring first and second-year students on various topics including Engineering Practices, common Design Patterns, Data Structures, Algorithms, OOP and Functional Programming.

  • Software Developer at ESH GmbH
    Oct 2010 - May 2011 · 8 mos

    Contributed to the development of an all-in-one software solution to oversee and manage a multitude of car-wash locations. I was responsible for implementing features such as enhanced reporting and customer notifications along with various UX enhancements. I came to terms with the company's SDLC and procedures quite quickly and I eventually became responsible for introducing new team-members to the company’s software architecture and processes.