Vadim Drobinin (last updated: 20 Jun 2026)
work@drobinin.com · drobinin.com · valzevul · valzevul
Vancouver, Canada · open to relocation
Senior iOS engineer and founder. I've built iOS apps since 2013 and commercial software since 2008. I was an early engineer at Sphere, a chat startup acquired by Twitter/X, then spent five years as a senior engineer on an FDA-regulated medical platform, where I scaled the app to tens of thousands of patients under HIPAA, built an in-house SDK used company-wide, and wrote the iOS hiring framework. I now run my own studio; Apple has featured several of my apps, including murmur in Best New Apps. My recent work is on LLMs and agents, real-time voice, and on-device machine learning, down to training my own models.
Experience ¶
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Founder & Lead Engineer @ Drobinin Limited, Vancouver, Canada (May 2025 - Present)
- Built 10+ App Store apps solo, on an AI-native toolchain of Claude Code and custom MCP servers I wrote.
- Launched murmur, a phone-call practice app on a real-time streaming-voice pipeline (App Store Best New Apps, an ElevenLabs grant, a Google Ventures feature); SwiftUI and TCA, 40+ scenarios.
- Trained the model behind Notch: a fine-tuned YOLOv8 detector with OpenCV geometry, in a compact offline Core ML model that runs in real time on the camera.
- Designed Constellation, a 3D knowledge-graph app for Apple Vision Pro rendering ~7,000 nodes on visionOS and RealityKit.
- Maintain Theseus, an open-source Swift package that backports the iOS 26 Liquid Glass look to iOS 13+ with Metal; contribute to the Firebase iOS SDK, Starscream, and the Swift Package Index (1,300+ contributions last year); and disclose security bugs, including a PII leak in Slack (HackerOne, 2021) and a heap-buffer-overflow in the Starscream WebSocket library.
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Senior iOS Engineer @ LivaNova / Epsy (FDA-regulated medical-device company), London, UK (May 2020 - May 2025)
- Built and scaled the Epsy app to tens of thousands of patients under HIPAA; it won two 2021 CES Innovation Awards (including Best of Innovation, Health/Wellness) and a Webby Honoree.
- Led the overhaul to SwiftUI and The Composable Architecture, holding a 99.9% crash-free rate and an App Store feature (4.9/5).
- Built and maintained an in-house AWS SDK fork used company-wide, and delivered the multi-quarter migration off legacy REST onto an offline-first data layer (AWS DataStore, Amplify).
- Led the app-wide Caregivers initiative, planned nearly a year ahead, owning spec and implementation across iOS and Android.
- Engineered BLE/NFC connectivity to medical devices, built on-device Core ML for seizure-prediction research, and ran OWASP MASVS audits (>70% compliance).
- Designed the company-wide iOS hiring framework, built a standalone watchOS app whose emergency features increased retention, and automated release and testing pipelines.
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Senior iOS Engineer @ Sphere (acquired by Twitter/X), London, UK (2017 - 2020)
- Early-stage engineer; architected and scaled the iOS app of a chat-based social network that raised $30M+ and was acquired by Twitter/X.
- Shared business logic across iOS and Android with Kotlin Multiplatform; led R&D on an in-house E2E testing framework (99.99% crash-free).
- Migrated networking to Protobuf, cutting traffic by 35%, and architected an in-app chat ad platform that doubled CTR.
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Mobile Engineering Consultant @ Drobinin Limited, remote (2013 - 2017)
- Built commercial iOS apps and led distributed teams for global clients, including VK.com, one of the region's largest social networks; won the Apple WWDC Scholarship.
- Led the first iteration of CryptoTrader for Zerion (now a major Web3 wallet): managed a squad of engineers and designers and owned the backend, iOS, and release pipeline behind its live WebSocket market data and 60fps charting.
- Fractional Head of Engineering for ventures; led a fitness app's mobile development to acquisition.
- Authored and delivered a 22-week onsite iOS course to 70+ engineers at VK's university, and taught algorithms at the Summer Informatics School, where my students won gold and silver at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).
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Lead iOS Engineer @ ToBox, remote (2015 - 2016)
- Led the iOS team (scaled from 2 to 8) and architected the transition to MVVM; directed the Swift rewrite of the core buyer-and-seller chat, decreasing buyer churn by 33%.
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Cloud Architect & Software Engineer @ Drobinin Limited, remote (2008 - 2013)
- Delivered 10+ projects specialising in scalable REST APIs and cloud architecture (Google App Engine, Django).
Awards ¶
- Apple App Store Best New Apps and Updates (2026)
- Product Hunt Product of the Day (2025)
- Member of the British Computer Society (2024)
- 2021 Webby Honoree, Best Apps/Software
- 2021 CES Best of Innovation, Health/Wellness
- 2021 CES Innovation Award, Software/Mobile Apps
- Google Material Design Award (2020)
- Apple WWDC Scholarship (2015)
- Technology Entrepreneurship (with Merit) - Stanford University (2014)
Skills ¶
- iOS & platforms: Swift, Objective-C, SwiftUI, UIKit, The Composable Architecture (TCA), Swift Concurrency, Combine; Swift Package and SDK design, SPM, modularisation; Kotlin Multiplatform; watchOS, iPadOS, tvOS, visionOS (RealityKit), Metal; WidgetKit, Live Activities, App Intents; accessibility (VoiceOver, Dynamic Type).
- AI & on-device ML: Apple Foundation Models, Core ML, Vision, Natural Language; coremltools and PyTorch (YOLOv8 fine-tuning, Core ML export); LLM integrations (Gemini), real-time voice (ElevenLabs), MCP, agent architectures; Claude Code.
- Data & delivery: GraphQL, REST, Protobuf, WebSockets; offline-first sync (AWS DataStore, Amplify), SwiftData, Core Data, CloudKit; BLE/NFC; XCTest, XCUITest, E2E frameworks; CI/CD (Fastlane, GitHub Actions, CircleCI); observability (Sentry, TelemetryDeck); A/B testing (GrowthBook); StoreKit subscriptions (RevenueCat).
- Security & compliance: OWASP MASVS, HIPAA, practical reverse engineering, responsible disclosure and bug bounties; Secure Enclave and Keychain hardening, Frida and mitmproxy; profiling with Instruments and LLDB.
Selected writing ¶
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Education ¶