Irene Pylypenko

I like building things that ship.

I’m an AI product leader who takes products from idea to execution. Across startups and enterprise — travel, cybersecurity, health tech — I’ve built SaaS products and led the AI and data work behind them. What ties it together is a habit of bridging engineering, product, and business: understanding a system deeply enough to build it, and framing it clearly enough to ship it.

I started as an engineer and did machine-learning research before it was a headline — a blood-based biomarker for early breast-cancer detection, for my M.Sc. at McGill. That pattern kept repeating: enter a domain, learn its real constraints, ship something. I’ve written .NET crisis-management software, Unity C# for a coaching app I helped invent, and phishing-detection models at Bell, where I also sat on the ML Security Operations Council. The title says product; the instinct is still to build.

Outside the day job I’ve spent years in Montreal’s startup community — mentoring at Techstars, FounderFuel, and XPRIZE AI, and co-founding Hacking Health, which grew to 40+ chapters and more than 10,000 members. I care about getting more women into technology, and about building teams that treat the people in them well.

Right now my focus is agentic and enterprise AI — building AI systems that make real decisions, and the governance that lets an organization trust them. This site is a collection of those experiments and technical explorations. You can find me on LinkedIn.