Lyubomir Stoykov

Previously Staff Engineer at Yelp (full timeline).
Now: explaining LLMs through videos, courses, and open-source tools - and helping companies build AI-run workflows.

What I'm working on

01

Content

AI and LLMs: YouTube videos, blog articles & ad-hoc thoughts on X.

02

Build

Open-source tools for understanding the foundations of AI engineering.

Coming soon

Latest writing

All posts →
LLM Fundamentals

The Anatomy of an LLM Request

What actually gets sent to an LLM: system prompts, tools, MCP, memory, skills, messages, caching, and the complete tool-use loop.

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Local AI

The Lifecycle of a Local AI Model: A Beginner's Map

A beginner's map to Hugging Face, Transformers, PyTorch, GGUF, safetensors, Ollama, LM Studio, Unsloth, MLX, vLLM, SGLang, and the rest of the vocabulary.

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About me

I grew up in Bulgaria, left home at 14 for a math high school, and moved to Germany at 19. I studied Computer Science at TU Munich and graduated with M.Sc (Distinction). After that I joined Yelp in Hamburg and worked on Ads for six years, going from Software Engineer to Staff Software Engineer. I left my $200K/year job in mid‑2025, moved back to Bulgaria for a sabbatical, and started working independently in 2026 with a focus on AI & LLMs.

Full timeline
  1. 2026 →

    Independent

    Building products, content, and selective consulting

  2. 2025 – 2026

    6-month Sabbatical

    Moved back to Bulgaria

  3. 2024 – 2025

    Staff Software Engineer

    Yelp · Ads · Hamburg · Munich

  4. 2021 – 2024

    Senior Software Engineer

    Yelp · Ads · Hamburg

  5. 2019 – 2021

    Software Engineer

    Yelp · Ads · Hamburg

  6. 2018 – 2019

    Software Engineer

    UnternehmerTUM · Digital Product School · Munich

  7. 2012 – 2018

    BSc & MSc, Computer Science (Distinction)

    TU Munich · Thesis presented at the Middleware Conference, Las Vegas