Volodymyr Pavlyshyn

Work with me

Architecture consulting on agent memory, knowledge graphs, and agent identity and trust — from a principal engineer who has shipped them in production. Five ways in, from a time-boxed review to an ongoing design partnership. Berlin, and remote across Europe.

Start a conversation by email

Agentic memory architecture

Design partner, ongoing

Designing the memory an agent actually needs: episodic, semantic and procedural layers, the knowledge-graph substrate underneath them, and the extraction-consolidation pipeline that keeps the whole thing from rotting. Plus retrieval that does more than nearest-neighbour — graph traversal, PageRank and community detection fused into one query.

What you take away

  • A memory architecture covering storage, retrieval and consolidation.
  • A prioritised implementation plan with trade-offs and evaluation criteria.

You might want this if

  • Your agent forgets things it was told last week.
  • Retrieval returns plausible chunks and the agent still cannot answer multi-hop questions.
  • You have a vector store and have started to suspect that is not a memory.

Fractional architect

Ongoing, part-time

Principal-level architecture without a full-time principal hire. A fixed rhythm of design reviews, architecture decisions and pairing with your tech leads, for teams building agents, knowledge graphs or memory-heavy products who need someone who has made these calls before — and written down why.

What you take away

  • Senior architecture ownership for your agent and data platform, on a regular cadence.
  • Decision records, design reviews and mentoring that stay with the team after I leave.

You might want this if

  • You are building agents and nobody on the team has designed agent memory before.
  • Your tech leads are strong, but architecture decisions keep getting made by default.
  • You need principal-level judgement now, ahead of a principal-level hire.

Agent identity & trust

Project or advisory

Identity for agents, and trust between them. DID methods — did:web, did:webvh, did:webs — KERI, verifiable credentials, GLEIF vLEI, agent reputation and trust registry design. Built from founding-engineer work on a production SSI platform, including a COVID verifiable-credentials system taken from zero to a live airport integration in four weeks.

What you take away

  • An identity and trust model for your agents and their integrations.
  • Protocol recommendations, trust boundaries and an implementation plan.

You might want this if

  • Your agents need to prove who they are to something that is not your own backend.
  • You are designing a trust registry and want to know what breaks at scale.
  • Someone said "just use OAuth" and you suspect that answer is incomplete.

Architecture review

Time-boxed, written findings

A senior read of an existing system, ending in a written document you can hand to your board or your team — what is sound, what will hurt, what to do first. Frequently the cheapest way to find out whether you need anything else on this page.

What you take away

  • A written assessment of strengths, risks and architectural trade-offs.
  • Prioritised recommendations and a walkthrough with your team.

You might want this if

  • A system works but nobody can say why, or what happens next.
  • You are about to commit to a data architecture you cannot easily undo.
  • You need an outside opinion your team will actually respect.

Workshops & training

Multi-day, on-site or remote

Teaching engineering teams the material behind the books: agent architecture, knowledge graphs as agent memory, and local-first and edge AI. Built around your team's real systems and decisions rather than assembled for a conference slot.

What you take away

  • Team sessions on agent architecture, knowledge graphs and local-first AI.
  • Exercises and reference material tied to your team’s engineering questions.

You might want this if

  • Your team is shipping agents by pattern-matching on blog posts.
  • You want a shared vocabulary before a big architectural decision, not after.
  • You would rather your engineers learned this from someone who has shipped it.

How it works

Include a short description of your system, the decision you face, and your timeline in your email. We agree the deliverables, duration and cadence in the written proposal before the work starts.

  1. A short call to work out what you actually need — often not what the enquiry said.
  2. A written proposal with scope, shape and price.
  3. The work, with whatever cadence of contact suits you.

No price list. The right number depends on scope, duration and what the work is worth to you, and I would rather find that out on a call than guess in public.

Where this comes from

Founding engineer at Affinidi — self-sovereign identity, DID and Sidetree protocol work, and a COVID verifiable-credentials platform taken from zero to a live airport integration in four weeks.

Founding engineer at Mykin — a privacy-first personal AI, with on-device semantic memory: a personal knowledge graph with vector search and clustering, running on a phone.

Before that: Zalando, TomTom, LiveIntent. Teams of five to fifteen, eighteen teams co-ordinated on one rollout, systems serving forty million customers, and three million events a minute.

Today: open-source memory systems — TypedGraph, Tiramemsu, OxigraphDB — and independent research on bitemporal graphs, so the advice comes from code that runs.

Track record

18 teams
about 100 engineers co-ordinated for the Zalando loyalty-programme rollout
40M+
customers served by Transaction Core, the order backend I architected and led
4 weeks
from zero to a live airport integration for a COVID verifiable-credentials platform
$2M
investment round I contributed to by representing the architecture to investors
3M/min
events through the data-feeder services I owned at LiveIntent

Start with a conversation

Tell me what you are building and what is going wrong. If I am not the right person, I will say so and try to point you at who is.

Start a conversation by email LinkedIn

Prefer a direct address? pavlyshyn@gmail.com