Origin
I’m Petro Orynycz (Петро Оринич), a Hungarian American scientist, AI engineer, computational linguist, and founder training large language models (LLMs) for emerging indigenous and heritage language ecosystems. I hail from Washington DC, with Lemko roots in Torysky, Medzilaborce, and Zahoczewie in today’s Poland and Slovakia, a transatlantic diaspora heritage shared with Andy Warhol and echoed in The Deer Hunter.
Path
My career path started hacking Apple IIs in the proverbial 1990s basement. It wound through heavy industry, including ironworks and a power plant, where I served as a language specialist. The path then rose into a DC high-rise office doing investigations work in the post-Soviet Oil and Gas industry, leveraging my language skills. Afterwards, I travelled the world running a global translation enterprise, serving majors like BMW, Mercedes, and Siemens. A highlight was contributing to the Google Translate project amid its neural translation breakthrough. Then, I led hundreds of linguists at a Capital Beltway defense contractor as a project manager and localization engineer. Finally, I’ve been a Senior Software Engineer at a Virginia enterprise for six years.
Results
I built and deployed the world’s first Lemko translation engine, achieving published DARPA-backed BLEU metric quality scores six times higher than Google Translate’s Ukrainian service. I share my results with other scientists in Springer Nature publications and have presented them at the National Defense Industrial Association’s flagship I/ITSEC conference, the world’s largest modelling, simulation, and training event.
Now
Today, I am working on fine-tuning large language models to support low-resource, indigenous, endangered, classical, and sleeping languages, and I’m expanding into an AI engineer bootcamp focused on practical skill, real systems, and shipping. Outside the screen, I host heritage language meetups and enjoy street workouts.
Education
I graduated from the Institute of East Slavic Languages at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland, the alma mater of Pope John Paul II and Nicolaus Copernicus. The languages of instruction were Polish and Russian, which I mastered from scratch.
How I Work
When you work with me, expect calm execution, sharp standards, test-driven engineering, and real shipping, with loyalty and clarity for people who show up.
Connect
I’m always open to meeting producers with high follow-through. If you’re shipping real work in AI, language, or training, reach out to me.
