Marek Zaremba-Pike
- role
- Staff Engineer, Engineering Lead Core AI Platform at Photoroom ↗
- scope
- 2,500+ requests/sec · 10 TB database · production generative-AI platform
- location
- London, United Kingdom
- marekzp@gmail.com
- cv
- /cv/ · pdf
Engineering leader specialising in production Generative AI platforms and AI-augmented software delivery. I build self-service systems that let teams define, evaluate, and deploy AI products for millions of users, with the cost, safety, and operational controls needed for five-nines reliability.
I also build Photoroom’s backend software-development systems, combining coding agents with structured evaluation and deterministic controls. They now produce around 80% of our merged backend PRs.
Writing
- What are PR reviews good for anyway?
PR review should focus on risks humans are best placed to judge, supported by automated checks and clear code ownership.
- Senior Claude reviewer is not a good use of engineering talent
If engineers only review agent-generated diffs, they bear accountability with none of the agency. Ownership has to start before the coding workflow runs.
- The laptop is the wrong place to run coding agents
Once coding agents reliably ship real work in parallel, the developer laptop becomes the most dangerous place to run them. Why Photoroom is moving remote.
- AI coding guardrails are mostly the old guardrails
The tools are new and the pace is faster, but the safety controls that make agent-written code shippable are the same unglamorous ones backend teams rely on.
Projects
Savin Hood ↗ — UK income tax calculator that tracks income year-round and flags threshold cliffs before they cost you. Rust and Python/Django backend, TypeScript and Astro frontend, built end-to-end with agentic tooling.
zero-downtime-migrations ↗ — PostgreSQL migration safety linter for Alembic, Django and Tortoise. Written in Rust, with 17 rules, and published on PyPI. Built at Photoroom.