NatanYagudayev

I lead engineering on systems that have to be right at scale — retrieval, AI, payments, tracking, and the infrastructure underneath.

Natan Yagudayev

Natan Yagudayev

New York, NY

I'm an engineering manager in the Growth org at Algolia, leading Activation and Outbound. Activation owns Launchpad and onboarding — the surface every new customer hits first — and Outbound owns DocSearch, Ask AI, and the Crawler. We took Crawler from ~95% to a 99.999% SLO at hundreds of millions of URLs/month, shipped Ask AI at 99.99% availability and ~9ms time-to-first-token, and rebuilt DocSearch v4 with AI baked in — re-establishing the Meta Docusaurus partnership and laying the foundation for Agent Studio, Algolia's space in Gen AI.

Before Algolia, I led platform engineering at Refersion, where I designed and shipped click and conversion tracking across Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, plus the unified payments system that pays out affiliates across providers and currencies.

My work has spanned a few different industries — search and AI infrastructure, affiliate marketing and e-commerce, communications, and physical security management. Different surface areas, similar pattern: things that have to be right at scale.

I like work that sits where product, engineering, and reliability meet. I write here when I have something worth saying.

Now

  • Migrating Ask AI to Agent Studio and building a new generation of AI-powered search experiences.
  • Bringing DocSearch v4 to thousands of docs sites, with the Meta partnership rebuilt.
  • Laying the foundation and vision for Agent Studio — Algolia's bet in Generative AI.
  • Hiring engineers who like ambiguous problems.

Selected Work

10 entries
2026 – Algolia
Developer tools
Classified

Working on the next chapter of DocSearch. Details under embargo until we ship.– PROJECT-ALG-014

2026 – Private project
Workforce management
Classified

Quietly building toward a different shape of workforce management — agents in the workflow, not bolted on. More when it has earned a name.– PROJECT-WFM-002

2025 – Algolia
AI infrastructure

Agent Studio

Helped shape the foundation and vision for Algolia's Gen AI products. Took everything we learned shipping Ask AI, DocSearch v4, and Crawler and handed it forward — the runway the Gen AI team is now building Agent Studio on.

2025 – Algolia
AI search

Ask AI

Conversational AI at 99.99% availability and ~9ms time-to-first-token. Took it from beta to hundreds of customers and meaningful ARR — the kind of AI feature that survives production.

2024 – Algolia
Developer tools

DocSearch v4

Rebuilt the open-source docs search powering thousands of developer sites. Re-established the Meta partnership, layered AI into a product teams already trusted, and set the foundation for Agent Studio — Algolia's space in Gen AI.

Writing

All notes →
April 2026

I built a personal AI assistant that lives in my SMS inbox

No app. No login. Just a phone number that thinks with me — and a few opinions about why that interface matters.

Engineering Philosophy

  1. § 01

    Manage the way I'd want to be managed.

    I was an IC long enough to know exactly what I wanted from a manager — someone who could guide the work and the career, and tell the difference between the two. That memory is the job description. I try to be the manager I would have asked for on my hardest week.

  2. § 02

    Stay close to the work.

    I review PRs, sit in RFCs, and stay in the room for architectural decisions. I open the product. I read support tickets. The distance between a manager and the system shows up in everything — what gets prioritized, what gets postponed, what quietly doesn't ship. So I keep that distance short.

  3. § 03

    Shield the team. Translate everything else.

    Most of the value of management is being a clean translation layer — turning business into engineering reality, and engineering into business outcomes. The team should feel the signal of that exchange, not the noise of it. That's the job.

  4. § 04

    Make the ambiguity concrete.

    Most product problems start as a feeling. The job is to turn it into a sentence, a diagram, a plan — in that order.

  5. § 05

    Ownership over assignment.

    Engineers do their best work when the problem is theirs, not when the ticket is theirs.

  6. § 06

    Move fast, know what cannot break.

    Speed is a feature. So is reliability. The skill is naming which one applies to the change in front of you.

  7. § 07

    Tell the story behind the work.

    Good systems still need narration. If you can't explain why something matters, it probably won't.

Off the Clock

Based in New York. Building small things, going deep on agents, lifting heavy things up and down after work, and adventuring with my wife.

Lifting
Heavy things, three days a week. Slow progress; the right kind.
Agents
Going deep on multi-agent systems off-hours. Useful, not just clever.
The City
Long walks, new restaurants, old bookstores. New York is the work.
Wife
Adventuring. The best part of any week.