About Me
I'm a senior backend engineer based in Cluj-Napoca with over 10 years of building production systems end to end. I've worked on everything from a custom Linux based data erasure product and home automation firmware to high scale Golang data pipelines at Apple. I care a lot about how systems behave in production, so monitoring, on-call readiness and fixing the gaps in existing systems are a big part of how I work. I also enjoy being the person on the team others come to with technical questions. Day to day I work mostly with Golang, Python, C/C++, PostgreSQL, Kafka and Kubernetes.
At heart I believe software is just a tool people use to solve other people's problems. I help by making that tool better, on time and in a cost effective way.
Work Experience
- Co-founded Aware Soft in late 2019 with a former colleague. Since 2020 every role on this page has been a contract through Aware. Some of our public work: github.com/AwareRO
- In 2024, between Apple and YouWipe, I improved our internal tooling, adding a lot of metrics and building a logging system with anomaly detection and alerting. Then I moved to sales, which brought in YouWipe a few months later.
- Since 2024 I've hired and trained 3 engineers who now cover a large part of our client work.
- KrispyHouse (May 2026 – Present, under 10h/month): I own the infrastructure of a PHP real estate data aggregator in the UK. Fixed the most urgent security issues I found, added monitoring and alerting for the infrastructure, and now help their developer add monitoring to the app itself.
- Digitalya (May 2020): covered for a Python developer on vacation on a Django app for reducing food waste, where users order food from their nearest canteen before going there. Fixed the bugs their client was complaining about, added small features like a QR code scanner for managing food items, and cleaned up the code so its owner could easily pick it up again.
- Code932 (Feb 2020, part time): built a Python integration between a PHP food ordering app running on a kiosk in a mall and the POS handling the payments.
- A European collaboration building AI apps for less technical users, with around 20 senior developers at its peak. I owned all the infrastructure, starting from an inherited Render (AWS) project and a large rented physical server.
- Added a Hetzner based environment that grew to about 40 VPSes, all reproducible with infrastructure as code using Hetzner's API and cloud-init, so it can be moved to another provider without much effort. On it I set up self hosted DNS, SSL management, package management, CI, Jitsi for meetings, a customer support platform, web analytics, observability and more.
- Built Python microservices (FastAPI, Flask, WebSockets) and one in Golang to fill gaps in the platform, from adapters to services orchestrating self hosted models for turn detection, embeddings, reranking LLM outputs and flagging prompts for guardrails (Meta's prompt guard model).
- After the funding ran out and the team shrank, I stayed on doing minimal maintenance on the infrastructure.
- Mobile games company. In the first 4 months, together with my Aware partner, I built their entire infrastructure: a development environment based mostly on self hosted open source tools, and a highly available production environment.
- Then moved to backend development in Golang and Node.js on the services behind their mobile games: a detailed analytics pipeline handling hundreds of events per second at peak, auth, observability, and game specific features like progress tracking and quests.
- Built the payouts part of a feature where players earn real money by completing in-game challenges, integrating PayPal and Tremendous (gift cards).
- Hired and trained a new engineer at Aware and handed over most of the backend work, which let me go part time in June.
- Built an account management app in Golang and Svelte that replaced a mix of manual work by a non-technical admin and developers editing configs in code. Anyone at YouWipe, and admins on the customer side, can now create accounts, reset passwords and change other settings themselves. About 70 customer organisations with 3-20 operators each use it so far, and the rest are being migrated from the old system when it suits the business.
- Added real organisation/sub-organisation nesting. The old system could only fake it with naming conventions like org1, org1-suborg1, which YouWipe admins had to remember.
- Took over their AWS infrastructure (Postgres on RDS, services on EC2) and started moving the services to ECS so they can scale more easily.
- Added monitoring, alerting and automated deployments, significantly cutting the developer effort required to maintain their systems.
- Added various features, improved their customer facing API and added report exports in several formats.
- Over time became responsible for the whole tech stack (Rust, Scala and Elm on Arch Linux), and hired and trained 2 junior engineers at Aware who now handle the day to day work. Since one of YouWipe's founding engineers returned, I've moved to light consulting.
- Part of an international team responsible for developing and maintaining microservices in Apple's infrastructure supporting manufacturing processes.
- We were a small team of senior engineers working across a wide range of internal services, and after a rigorous onboarding we were expected to work very autonomously. We covered the whole life cycle of a service, from proposals and design to implementation, bug fixing, investigations, on-call and incidents.
- As the most experienced of the team's 3 developers, I contributed to most of the work that grew the Golang data pipeline we owned from tens to hundreds of GB/s. We fixed scaling issues, improved observability and added features that brought more factories on board. For example, a large factory wanted to join but had special data handling requirements, so we added support for them, ran a 2 week pilot and onboarded them, which increased our processed volume by about 50%. This happened several times, and each new feature usually brought a few more factories after it.
- Created several new Golang services integrating with other parts of Apple's infrastructure (Kafka, Postgres, FDB).
- Config change requests for our pipelines came in over Slack and we handled them by hand, which grew from under 5 to 20-30 requests per week. I proposed a self-service admin app for the ~30 manufacturing sites using the pipelines, and once it was accepted I built the Golang backend and led a frontend team of about 6 people building the UI over 6 months.
- Onboarded 5 engineers (4 backend, 1 DevOps) on our 5 person team as people came and went, and was the main technical reference for our services.
- Was one of the 3 people on the on-call rotation, and usually the one called at 2AM when something broke.
- Built an end to end testing framework in Python so business analysts could write their acceptance criteria as executable tests (BDD style with Behave, and a second version with pytest). The system under test was a high throughput C++ PCAP ingestion system that was hard to test without the hardware, so the framework spun up an environment as close to the real one as possible, including Kafka and ZooKeeper, for every scenario.
- Worked on the high throughput C++ data ingestion component of Corelight's network security sensors, helping with testing, bug fixes, metrics and other improvements.
- Wrote a plugin for the Zeek ecosystem in a mix of C++ and Zeek script.
- Part of a two person team responsible for maintaining and developing the firmware running on three of Ezlo's home automation routers: Vera Edge, Vera Plus and Vera Secure.
- A large product with a sizeable customer base, kept in maintenance mode while a bigger team built a replacement from scratch. The code base spanned more than 10 languages, mostly C++, Python, PHP and JavaScript.
- Investigated customer reports and fixed the most pressing issues across all the infrastructure the routers depended on, focusing on the software running on the routers themselves, where most bugs were.
- Shipped critical updates to 40-50 thousand users whose routers controlled anything from light bulbs and water heaters to thermostats, door locks and security systems.
- Provided technical support to the community of plugin developers writing Lua home automation apps for these routers, distributed much like apps on the Android/iOS app stores.
- Java and Python trainer for SDA classes in Cluj-Napoca, and remotely after the pandemic struck.
- Delivered ~300 training hours across 8 student cohorts.
- The courses covered an introduction to programming and focused on full stack web development.
- Java classes used Spring Boot and Python classes used Django, both paired with Angular on the frontend.
- First developer on a certified data erasure product, a self contained tool booted from USB or PXE that detects the hardware, wipes storage devices using industry standards (NIST 800-88 Clear/Purge, DoD, Gutmann, VSITR, etc.) and runs basic hardware tests.
- Started as the only developer and in the first 2-3 years brought in and trained 7 engineers, many of them from my faculty. We worked in 4 pairs (low level, UI, web and mobile) so people could cover for each other, and the team later grew to around 12.
- Wrote the erasure engine in C for performance and owned the low level side of the product, including a custom stripped down Linux distribution based on Porteus Kiosk, kernel work, some assembly, the development environment and testing.
- As lead engineer I provided the technical support for the product's Common Criteria certification. Later certifications, like ADISA, needed less and less of my involvement.
- Developed the wiping engine for Android, iOS and macOS devices and led the UI team building the bindings for it.
- Developed web and desktop apps for international clients met on freelancer.com.
- Started with mini games and other web assets in Flash, using ActionScript 2 (procedural) and ActionScript 3 (object oriented).
- Moved on to building desktop apps in Java with AWT and Swing.
