AI Systems Engineer

Sardor
Nodirov

Building real-time AI systems at the intersection of language, motion, and expression. Currently shipping Lapwing — an interactive character platform where 3D avatars think, speak, move, and emote in real time.

Founding AI Engineer @ Lapwing
CS & AI Honors @ Colby College '26
NLP & Embedded Systems @ University of Edinburgh

motion generation multimodal LLMs real-time systems facial animation

sardor /at/ nodirov /dot/ com LinkedIn GitHub @randen_ai

Selected Work

Lapwing Sep 2025 – Present

Founding AI Engineer

A real-time AI character platform where 3D avatars think, speak, move, and emote — all in the browser at 60 FPS. I built the full pipeline from the ground up: an async orchestration layer that parallelizes language, speech, and motion generation, a Three.js retargeting engine for fluid character animation, and a multi-layer facial expression system that composites blinks, emotions, and lip-sync in real time.

200+ users · 60% latency reduction · 50% faster cold starts

Three.js WebSocket VRM MoMask FastAPI Asyncio

Ember AI May 2024 – Mar 2025

Full-Stack AI Engineer, Contract · San Francisco (Remote)

First engineering hire at an early-stage startup turning photos into narrated memory experiences. I owned the full product stack — from the React/Next.js frontend to a FastAPI backend with a distributed Redis job queue handling heavy AI generation workloads. Built a custom Three.js playback engine to keep audio and visuals in tight sync across global clients.

Sub-50ms audio-visual sync · 40% infrastructure cost reduction

React Next.js FastAPI Redis Cloudflare R2

Davis Institute for AI Sep 2023 – May 2024

AI Research Assistant

Built a conversational voice AI for Colby College that answered questions about the institution over the phone in real time. Designed the full-duplex audio pipeline with a custom barge-in protocol so callers could interrupt naturally, and grounded all responses in verified data using a RAG pipeline over 800+ pages of institutional content.

400 daily users · 85% resolved without human intervention

RAG Vector Search Twilio Azure Speech WebSockets

Education

Colby College

B.A. Honors in Computer Science, AI Concentration · Expected May 2026 · Waterville, ME

Thesis: Real-time Conversational Motion Generation for Virtual Characters

Presidential Scholar · GPA: 3.77 · Dean's List

Founded Colby AI Society — grew to 50+ members, secured funding for student ML research

Study Abroad