Hi, I'm Alexei Masterov - Product Executive · Visual Search (Google) → Autonomous Rotorcraft (Daedalean, acquired) · Helicopter Pilot
I thrive at the intersection of complex engineering and commercial strategy. My passion lies in building safety-critical autonomous systems. I excel in high-stakes environments where precision meets innovation.
At a glance
Curated signals on strengths, focus areas, and how they can help.
Directed product strategy for autonomous rotorcraft technologies at a leading European AI startup.
Currently provides expert product and strategy consulting to firms building high-stakes autonomous systems.
Can help teams bridge the gap between complex engineering research and successful commercial product deployment.
🚀 Career trajectory
Financial infrastructure and security (1998–2010)
Started at 17 on a bulletin-board job to pay my own tuition. Macroeconomic data at Haver, electronic market making and risk at Credit Suisse, trading middleware at ICAP, then enterprise security at Passlogix and Oracle. Columbia M.S. in computer science along the way.
✦ M.S. Computer Science
✦ Trading systems
✦ Self-funded from 17
Google, visual search (2010–2015)
Product for visual search on Hartmut Neven's team: Goggles, Translate's optical character recognition, and the work that became Google Photos. Two patents. Berkeley Haas for Google's product management program in 2011.
✦ Computer vision
✦ Google Photos
✦ 2 patents
Daedalean, autonomous rotorcraft (2022–2025)
Head of Product for mission autonomy on helicopters, through to autonomous flight on a four-axis autopilot. Acquired in 2025. Between Google and this: Senior Director of Product at Cortica, five years at sea as captain of SV eXpeditious, and CTO of an edtech startup.
✦ Head of Product
✦ Acquired 2025
✦ Autonomous flight
💪🏻 Superpowers
Entering a hard domain and shipping in it
Finance, security, computer vision, autonomous flight — same method each time
✦ Six domains in one career, each entered cold: macroeconomic data, electronic market making, enterprise security, computer vision, offshore sailing, autonomous rotorcraft.
✦ The method is always the same: get the whole map first, then go find the edge of it. It is why I climb the tallest tower in a city I have never been to.
✦ Trusted by physicist founders on both sides of it: Hartmut Neven at Google, Luuk van Dijk at Daedalean.
Computer vision shipped at Google scale
Five years making machines understand what they are looking at
✦ Product for visual search on Hartmut Neven's team: Goggles, Translate's optical character recognition, and the work that became Google Photos.
✦ Two patents: Smart Camera User Interface, and Face Template Balancing.
✦ Berkeley Haas, Google's product management program, 2011.
Operating where the stakes are physical
Five years offshore as captain, and a helicopter pilot certificate
✦ Captained SV eXpeditious for five years, Caribbean and offshore. Licensed Master, 25 ton, with auxiliary sail endorsement.
✦ Private pilot certificate, rotorcraft-helicopter. Also Part 107 remote pilot. I am the customer for the products I build.
✦ Arrived in New York at 16 without enough English to buy stamps at the post office. Hunter College honors degree, then Columbia.
I'm excited about
✦ World models — the geometry, object permanence and physical causality that embodied AI still lacks. This is the problem large language models were for text.
✦ Autonomous aircraft, where the hard part is the regulator and not the demo. I know that world.
✦ Machines that remove real bottlenecks: the farm worker who stops breathing pesticide, the cargo flight on a route too dangerous to staff, the inspection that finds the crack before the bridge falls.
I can help with
✦ Telling you whether an autonomy demo is real. I fly helicopters and I have shipped the software, so I know which failure modes the video is not showing.
✦ Taking a research result and finding the product in it. That was the job at Google visual search and at Daedalean, and it is the part I am actually good at.
✦ Getting up to speed in a domain you assumed would take a new hire a year. I have done it six times and I can tell you how.
I would love your help on
✦ Introductions to people building in embodied AI, autonomy, robotics or aviation. I am looking for my next role.
✦ Naming companies that genuinely run on the product model — teams given problems and outcomes, not roadmaps. Everyone claims it. I want to hear from people who have worked inside one.
✦ The shape: a hard problem at the edge of what is currently possible, owned end to end, on a small team, reporting to the person accountable for the outcome. Company size does not matter. A moonshot inside a large company counts.