Ilya Kirnos

Partner & CTO

All Team
Investment
Engineering
Ilya Kirnos

Prior to co-founding SignalFire, Ilya was a Software Engineer at Google (2004-2012). During his time at Google, Ilya held several technical leadership positions. He was a Technical Lead for Gmail Ads and was responsible for predicting consumer purchase intent and consumer Gmail monetization. Ilya was also a Technical Lead for AdWords Performance and Scalability where he managed responsiveness and uptime of the AdWords frontend. Ilya was also the founder and Technical Lead for Google Prediction Markets, where he led the engineering team from conception to product launch.

After Google, Ilya joined CardSpring, a payment platform company backed by Accel and Greylock Partners. At CardSpring, Ilya led platform backend development. CardSpring was acquired by Twitter.

Ilya started his software engineering career at Bell Labs and Oracle. Ilya graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in Computer Science and a minor in Applied Mathematics.

Stage focus

Seed

Series A & B

Sector Focus

Cybersecurity

AI/ML Tools

Dev Tools

Ilya Kirnos's Posts

Hire from these 9 AI-vy League companies, not Ivy League schools
Advice
Must-Read
January 31, 2024

Hire from these 9 AI-vy League companies, not Ivy League schools

A Harvard diploma, a PhD, or stint at Google are no longer the best signifiers of the top minds in artificial intelligence. Instead, hirers should look for engineers and researchers with applied AI experience at a group of nine startups that our data shows have the highest concentration of AI talent.
Why our venture firm has a CTO
SignalFire
Must-Read
Beacon AI
January 9, 2024

Why our venture firm has a CTO

I’m often asked what it means to be a venture firm CTO, so I wrote this post to share what an org structure with engineering at its core unlocks for our investment and portfolio success strategies.
SigNoz pioneers open source observability with $6.5M led by SignalFire
Portfolio
September 28, 2023

SigNoz pioneers open source observability with $6.5M led by SignalFire

Built on OpenTelemetry, SigNoz puts all your critical monitoring metrics in one place with predictable pricing
What makes the modern stack so shaky
Portfolio
Advice
June 14, 2023

What makes the modern stack so shaky

Point solutions fall shot and midmarket customers don't scale, so data infra founders should build complete enterprise solutions
How OneSignal pivoted to power notifications for 1 in 7 apps
Portfolio
September 1, 2022

How OneSignal pivoted to power notifications for 1 in 7 apps

After leading its Series A and B, SignalFire backs OneSignal’s new $50M Series C
Investing in Twingate, a VPN your team will actually love
Portfolio
April 14, 2022

Investing in Twingate, a VPN your team will actually love

SignalFire is joining Twingate's $42M Series B to help it build a modern enterprise VPN that doesn't cause latency or performance issues.
Investing in Faros, the engineering bottleneck-breaker
Portfolio
March 2, 2022

Investing in Faros, the engineering bottleneck-breaker

Why SignalFire is leading a $16M seed to change the future of engineering operations with Faros