About
As the second hire and Founding Engineer at Artera, I built the entire backend and AWS infrastructure from scratch, scaling to a platform with ~1M artworks and 700k+ AI-generated audio guides. I operate at a CTO-level scope — contributing to product strategy, partnerships, and technical direction while leading engineering execution.
Deep hands-on experience across Python, TypeScript, AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, SQS, Kinesis), SQL/NoSQL databases, event-driven architectures, ETL pipelines and REST APIs. I led the development of core AI-powered features including the Recommender System, 'Shazam for Art' Image Capture, AskArtera (RAG agent), and large-scale TTS audio guide pipelines.
Currently also building dartpost.app, a SaaS for AI-powered content creation and scheduling on X. Contact me if you want to build something cool together! 🤗
Email: kshvidler@gmail.com
Skills
Work Experience
Artera LTD
- Joined as the second hire and built the entire backend and AWS infrastructure from scratch, scaling to a platform with ~1M artworks and 700k+ AI-generated audio guides.
- Designed and deployed the full AWS architecture: VPC, IAM, ECS (EC2), Lambda, RDS (PostgreSQL), Cassandra, S3, CloudFront, SQS, Kinesis — with CI/CD, monitoring and logging.
- Built core backend services in Django REST, Flask and FastAPI — auth, payments (Stripe, Apple/Google), admin platforms and dozens of serverless microservices.
- Designed large-scale ETL pipelines (Python, PySpark) turning messy source data into a structured, deduplicated dataset of ~1M artworks.
- Built hybrid search combining FAISS vector search with keyword retrieval, and a TikTok-style recommender using fine-tuned CLIP embeddings.
- Built 'Shazam for Art' — embeddings + YOLO object detection + keypoint matching for robust painting identification.
- Built AskArtera — an AI agent answering art queries using internal data + web grounding (RAG).
- Built automated pipelines generating 700k+ AI audio guides using open-source TTS, plus serverless Whisper ASR pipelines for voice comments.
- Designed scaled AI-driven SEO strategy generating programmatic artwork pages — achieving millions of monthly Google impressions.
- Conceived and executed a B2C → B2B pivot, including an end-to-end museum/gallery discovery system (scraping → backend → frontend maps).
- Led and mentored a team of 3 engineers; secured tech partnerships with AWS and DataStax as primary technical contact.
- Delivered cross-domain work including immersive 3D visualisation (CLUSTA) displayed at FRAMELESS London.
Education
Check out my latest work
I've worked on a variety of projects, unfortunately I can't share most of them here. More public projects coming soon!
DartPost
Full end-to-end SaaS for AI-powered content creation and scheduling on X (Twitter). Real-time AI-assisted writing (chat + editor with streaming), scheduling via EventBridge + Lambda, Stripe subscriptions, and BYOK OAuth integrations.
AskArtera
AI agent capable of answering art-related queries using internal data and external web grounding (RAG). Built at Artera.
'Herbie' AI Discord Agent
(In Development) Self-aware, interactive Discord AI companion named Herbie.
Artera
AI powered Art-tech platform for art discovery. (live on iOS and Android)
Get in Touch
Want to chat? Feel free to connect on LinkedIn and DM me and I'll respond whenever I can. You can also email me at kshvidler@gmail.com