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Work Background
Upgrade EducationChief Technology Officer
Nov. 2023 - May. 2025Bucharest, RomaniaUpgrade Education is an EdTech company that originated in Bucharest, Romania, serving clients worldwide. The company offers a mentorship service that provides high school students with personalized support for university admissions to top universities in the US, UK, and EU. In my role, I have worn many hats, blending strategic leadership with hands-on technical work. My main achievemets, beyond adding features, were:
- improving commit frequency by 3x
- greatly improving deployment frequency, up from once every couple of weeks to to multiple times per week
- improving error rate and number of defects by 5x
- improving performance by 3-10x, depending on usecase
- improving data quality and visibility, allowing for data dashboards meaningful to the business
- improving the NPS from the mid 60s to the mid 80s, by engaging users, incorporating feedback and providing support Here’s a breakdown of my responsibilities:
- defining the tech vision to align with business goals, evaluating technologies, and deciding between building or buying
- leading platform architecture and development, ensuring timely delivery and sound decisions on stack, scalability, and performance
- hiring and managing engineers and contractors
- ensuring system reliability, security, and cost efficiency
- collaborating with departments to refine workflows for better results
- simplifying technical topics so everyone sees the big picture
- managing product and project tasks with the CEO and teams: planning, estimating, identifying risks, and balancing short-term and long-term goals
- reviewing past decisions to spot blind spots and pivot when needed
- tracking and improving metrics to better reflect company goals
Stone Soup Tech Solutions, LLCSolutions Architect / Product Owner
Dec. 2020 - Nov. 2023Bucharest, RomaniaStone Soup Tech is a full-service digital agency focusing on creative mobile, web, and software solutions. With a core team of senior developers, award-winning designers, and Ph.D. digital scientists, Stone Soup uses advanced technologies to solve problems, create compelling products, and grow companies. My responsibilities with them are roughly the following:
- represent the customer within the development process and the other way around
- own the long-term product roadmap, maintain and prioritise the short-term product backlog - schedule, prepare, track & communicate releases; sometimes also execute them
- develop, own, maintain and enforce the product architecture throughout the product's life
- propose revisions and enforce the workflows and procedures regarding SDLC and related tooling
- serve as a subject matter expect on the online video topic
- help the team by doing research, finding the right solutions and providing PoCs for some of the more complicated issues
- help the team define the technology stack and drive the adoption of new technologies
- track and help improve quality and performance, being personally accountable for both
- manage suppliers/subcontractors/service providers
bitExpert AGSolutions Architect / Tribe Lead
Mar. 2020 - Jan. 2021Bucharest, RomaniabitExpert AG is a consulting, digital transformation and IT-services company, with offices in Mannheim and Bucharest. I joined as a solution architect, because they needed the expertise and wanted to expand the Bucharest office, and I quickly picked up the "tribe lead" role. As a solution architect, the main responsibilities are:
- understanding our customer's business problems and finding the best tech solution to solve them
- advising PMs, developers and customers on various technical matters
- creating proposals for the products' architecture, CI/CD setups, coding standards and workflows
- keeping an eye out that the architecture and the standards are respected throughout the lifetime of the project As a tribe lead, it's a mix of administrative and people management responsibilities like:
- having an overview of the tribe's workload and advise on staffing needs
- receive, aggregate, discuss and provide feedback, act as a mediator between the employees and management
- know the skills, interests and intentions of tribe members; facilitate their development through the company's programs
- approving holiday requests, having regular one-to-one sessions with the tribe members, etc.
Groupe RenaultSolutions Architect
Dec. 2018 - Jan. 2020Bucharest, RomaniaGroupe Renault had an initiative to create a development hub in Bucharest, bringing in people with fresh ideas, as part of their ongoing commitment to stay up to date with current technologies and trends. I was recruited when the hub had just started up and I left when we were already around 50 people. The responsibilities were roughly:
Specifies and maintains architecture of the solution that will be developed by lead dev
Provides expertise to ensure product performance, ecosystem integration and flexibility
Provides input on any architecture and technology issue
Ensures architecture, required capacities and tech alignment between teams maximising reuse of components
Creates High Level architecture diagram Identifies impacted systems Drives resolution for architectural ambiguities Provides enterprise technical architectural perspective Creates sequence diagrams for developers and supports development in High level Design Provides input on any architectural issues Helps resolve architectural issues that emerge during integration On top of that, I helped out on the recruitment part, performing technical screenings and interviews, staying in touch with recruiters with feedback on the candidates they brought in, and contributing to the overall growth process.
LINK Academy RomaniaTrainer
May. 2018 - Mar. 2019Bucharest, RomaniaLINK group is a leading multinational company with more than 20 years of success in professional education and certification in the fields of information technology and contemporary business. The position involved teaching a couple of courses on Java, PHP, databases and web development, and also developing the training materials for the courses.
CivicTech RomaniaSoftware Architect
Apr. 2018 - Jun. 2019Bucharest, RomaniaCivicTech Romania is a non-profit tech startup whose mission is to make public services digital by default by developing open Source solutions designed for a globally connected, digital society. Responsibilities:
- researching software solutions that may be applied for faster time-to-market in the digital public services realm
- developing expertise in third party open/closed source solutions
- creating architecture, algorithms, and designs for software solutions that meet the beneficiary's requirements
- developing plans for integrating existing solutions with the beneficiary's existing systems, creating POCs
- working closely with the beneficiaries and their in-house teams to explain the benefits and justify the investment in each particular proposed solution
Crossover for WorkChief Software Architect
May. 2017 - Apr. 2018Bucharest, RomaniaCrossover employs remote-working contractors in all positions and experience levels. The products I am responsible for are several network appliances and the underlying management ecosystem.
The solutions make use of Java (Java EE being migrated to Spring framework), PHP, different flavors of SQL (MySQL, Postgres) and web-based frontends using various Javascript frameworks (Angular, ExtJS). We work agile, code is stored in Git, we follow Gitflow and there are complete CI/CD pipelines for each product, including automated tests and code quality reports.
Products are generally hosted on AWS, mostly using Docker containers. Responsibilities:
- developing expertise in one or more of our proprietary enterprise software products
- leveraging your broad technology capability set and maintain a level of excitement in using various technologies to architect, develop, and iteratively deploy real enterprise class software
- achieving an expert level understanding of our customers’ environments and their use of our products
- architecting and leading weekly technical delivery of one or more products in a way that maintains an unyielding focus on quality while matching the needs of the target customer base.
- creating solutions architecture, algorithms, and designs for solutions that scale to the customer's enterprise/global requirements
- leading a small team of Software Engineers to apply software engineering practices and implement automations across all elements of solution delivery
- manage accountability of team members, with pinpoint focus on quality; Personally accountable for resolution of the most technically challenging issues
Sorin Vasilescu PFAInformation Technology Consultant
Mar. 2017 - May. 2017Bucharest, RomaniaSeveral small projects, including a custom OIDC Single Sign-On solution integrated in an enterprise environment and some work on e-commerce websites.
GovIT HubFellow
Oct. 2016 - Jan. 2017Bucharest, RomaniaGovITHub is a governmental program that aims to involve IT professionals from the private sector. The goal is to have an innovative, entrepreneurial approach and develop IT tools that improve government transparency, efficiency and the citizens’ interaction with the government. The project is composed of 20 "fellows", people that dedicate their full time and attention to the initiative, and more than 300 volunteers that contribute with at least 8 hours per week. The fellows' responsibilities are identifying projects, discussing with the governmental beneficiaries, documenting the requirements, recruiting volunteers and managing the project as a whole, including from a technical perspective. Together with a couple of volunteers, we developed a ticketing system that would help institutions to organise their communication with the public. I handled the business analysis, solution architecture and much of the code. The project is open source here: https://github.com/sorinvasilescu/petitii According to our calculations, after 4 months of activity, GovITHub's projects had saved more than 1 million EUR in public spending, with a cost of 160k EUR.
ReplyTechnical Consultant
Jul. 2016 - Sep. 2016Bucharest, RomaniaOverseeing the continued development of mobile apps for a major client in the banking business, in terms of architecture, security and quality.
Providing technical consultancy for both the client's personnel and for internal managers.
Directly communicating with suppliers in order to assure we meet the technical requirements, deadlines and quality.
Helping out various colleagues with technical tasks, for example the QA team with some mobile automated testing.
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