Oleksandr Paraska

I'm the CTO at Togal.ai. We build AI that reads architectural drawings and does construction takeoff — the part of estimating where you measure quantities from plans. I've been running engineering there since late 2021. What that means in practice: I shipped a computer vision pipeline that classifies and measures building assemblies from plan sheets. I built the backend and frontend. I hired and managed the engineering team. I prototyped features, reviewed code, argued about architecture, and handled the stuff that doesn't fit neatly into anyone's job description. Most recently I shipped TogalCHAT — an agentic AI product where estimators interact with their plans through conversation instead of clicking through menus. And I moved our engineering org to an AI-native development workflow: AI-generated code, AI-assisted review, and the verification practices you need when machines write your software. Before Togal, I was CTO at BuyDRM (digital rights management for media companies), ML engineer at eyeo (the Adblock Plus people), and did a fellowship at OpenMined working on privacy-preserving machine learning. I've been writing software professionally since 2005. I write about AI, construction tech, and what it's actually like to build software with AI at shoniko.com. Based in Germany, originally from western Ukraine.