About Me

I'm Vladimir Novkov – an AI engineer, data scientist and sports psychologist based in Sofia, Bulgaria. I build AI systems and validate the data behind them.

I spent ten years at 16Personalities, a personality test taken more than 1.5 billion times. I started as a researcher and ended up leading data analysis: validating the core assessment, designing surveys, and building 16 production dashboards in Tableau and R Shiny on BigQuery. That decade taught me psychometrics, A/B testing and analytics at a scale few people ever see.

Since then I have shipped my own products: SportPersonalities.com, a 183,000-line assessment platform with AI-generated reports; DataWeaver, an R Shiny statistics platform; and systems for LLM automation, cold email and RAG chatbots, all on infrastructure I run myself.

As a sports psychologist I write and speak about the mind in sport. I've been quoted in Men's Journal and Tom's Guide, have appeared on Bloomberg TV Bulgaria and BNR, and co-host the Bulgarian podcast Practical Stoicism. I'm a native Bulgarian speaker with an MA in Translation and the Cambridge CPE, so I also take Bulgarian–English localization work.