A software developer shaped by the world he lives in, originally from Romania, living in Zürich, Switzerland

Website / LinkedIn / GitHub

Founder and Head of Engineering @ Norm (Apr 2023 - Present)

Norm assesses the energy efficiency, CO₂ emissions, and renovation costs of buildings. Integrate Norm’s digital solution into your process to help your customers identify their building’s energy renovation potential.

In my role I help build hands-on the foundations that power the Norm products: the infrastructure and the web apps. Working alongside a very small, highly productive engineering team. I enjoy seeing our products evolve and grow on a daily basis.

Engineering Leader @ Ledgy (Jun 2019 - Mar 2023)

Principle Engineer Manager (Jan 2022 - Mar 2023)

In a hybrid Engineer/Manager role I have contributed to Ledgy’s mission: be the top player in Europe for private equity management.

We grew our Engineering team to 20 engineers, while increasing diversity and talent. Managed a team of 6 engineers. Helped run Ledgy’s second traineeship program where 5 trainees started their career on a journey to become Junior Software Engineers.

We continued to increase the bar for technical excellence, while coaching each other in order to reach our personal and company objectives. <br

Head of Engineering (Mar 2021 - Dec 2021)

For most part of 2021, responsible for the success of the Engineering department. Helped with hiring in doubling the team size (~12 engineers), onboard new engineers and coach existing ones to faster progress in their career.

Towards the end of the year, I facilitated the transition towards a new Head of Engineering responsible for the managing of an ever fast growing Engineering Department.

We had a Series A investment in September 2021 from Sequoia Capital.

Senior Software Engineer (Jun 2019 - Feb 2021)

As one of the first employees, joined the company as a Senior Software Engineer, looking to have an impact on Ledgy’s mission to “democratise ownership in startups”.

Helped run Ledgy’s first traineeship program where 2 trainees started their career on a journey to become Junior Software Engineers. After two years they were Mid-level Engineers helping with onboarding and hiring.

Full Stack Engineer @ On AG (Mar 2018 - May 2019)
Worked as part of the Growth team in the Digital Marketing department, a cross-functional team made of Full Stack developers, Data Scientists and UI/UX Designers.

• the team was responsible for understanding better the customers, run experiments and develop features that increase user engagement and conversion rate in the e-commerce web shop.
• some challenges I faced where to improve the checkout flow and implement saved payment methods or add new payment methods (like ApplePay).
• improved overall developer experience, particularly proud of faster development time, creating preview environments and faster releases to production of new features.
• improved the continuous integration pipeline, by adding Codeship and Codeclimate integrations.
• facilitated the transition on Frontend to use Vue.js & Webpack. Introduced the team to GraphQL for faster building of APIs.
• on the Backend work was done mainly in Ruby with Spree and Rails web frameworks.
  
  

Engineering Team Lead @ XING (Apr 2016 - Feb 2018)
Worked on XING Referral Manager, an automated and intelligent employee referral product together with a highly motivated and passionate team of Full-Stack Developers.

• managed a team of four developers, where together we set and reached daily goals
• team was responsible for whole development cycle, very few dependencies on other teams
• worked on product features and integrations implemented on the whole application stack
• frontend code was written in Javascript (ES6) mostly React + Redux, bundled with Webpack
• backend: REST, GraphQL APIs and business logic mostly written in Ruby
• tests done with RSpec, complete integration tests written with webdriver.io and browsers tested with BrowserStack
• internal analytics tracked with Segment.io integrations, end-users behaviour tracked with Mixpanel
• continuous-integration and deployment pipeline done with Jenkins
• production code runs with Docker on Marathon/Mesos
• development tools are automated, docker-compose is used for running services, tests suite speed kept fast
• daily pair programming and code reviews, regularly pushing the upper limits for code quality
• helped onboarding and mentoring new team members, organised team events (Un-conference style)
• closely worked with the Product Owner and supported the Custom Support team when needed
• traveled often (overall 2-3 months in a year) to Hamburg, Germany and Barcelona, Spain
  
  

Lead Software Developer @ BuddyBroker AG (May 2015 - Apr 2016)
BuddyBroker was acquired by XING in April 2016.

Built Eqipia, an automated and intelligent Employee Referral product, together with a small and passionate team of Full-Stack Developers, where I was the first hired employee of the company. The team I was responsible for, was remote located in Switzerland, Germany and Poland.

After XING acquired BuddyBroker, we integrated our product in the XING e-Recruiting suite. Together we improved our vision of the product and achieved better results for our customers: help more companies hire Smarter by including their employees in the hiring process.

The resulting XING Referral Manager product, was successfully unveiled at Zukunft Personal in September 2016.

Frontend Developer @ Gild Inc (Apr 2013 - Apr 2015)
Gild was acquired by Citadel in October 2016.

Frontend developer on Search team along with other engineers in San Francisco and Milan, Italy. Responsible to build and maintain customer-facing applications known as the Gild Platform.

Mainly worked on Gild’s cornerstone search products (Gild Source and Talent Pool). In addition helped built a multi browser extension (Gild Widget), and a new product (Mission Control) that enabled internal teams across the company to better manage accounts and increase sales.

• went to San Francisco for a full month of Onboarding
• collaborated with UI/UX designers and Product Managers to implement and deliver new features
• worked on the Search engine (ElasticSearch) to implement custom fields search, ranking and sorting of profiles (at the time 14 Million)
• worked with data science team to integrate predictive analytics (Gild Score, Spotlight features) into Gild Source, and present such data on profile pages with interactive charts and nice graphics
• spearhead the browser widget extension (Gild Widget), that works on all browsers and gives matches to Gild Source profiles when surfing social networks (like Github, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.)
• promote inside the team best-practices, and weekly tech events (like Lunch&Learn presentations, Code Kata sessions)
• help scale the engineering team: participated in technical interviews and on-boarding of new developers (most of them seniors with 10+ years of work experience, one of them was my new manager)
• improved the Continuous Integration flow by writing tests and deploy jobs (with Jenkins)
• wrote developer documentation (Wiki), and system/integration tests (with RSpec, Cucumber)
• created data migration scripts (Mongo) to move functionalities between Gild Platform’s applications
• developed and maintain REST APIs (with Grape)
  
  

Junior Frontend Developer @ Sportboom (Nov 2012 - Mar 2013)
Sportboom helps Sport Centres, to promote their activities, and sport lovers, to more easily find the information they need in order to practice the sport they want.

• worked as a Junior developer, doing Ruby and Javascript development
• collaborated with the founders and the Senior Developer to implement new features
• learned a lot from the Senior developer who had previous experience working at different startups around the world
• maintained and evolve the Admin section of our app used by customer support
• started development one the German web site
• worked on my first web scraper to load the German cities information into our application
  
  

Junior Software Developer @ Starbytes (Reply) (Jul 2012 - Nov 2012)
Starbytes, a software-as-a-service product done mainly with Java technologies, is available for Italian companies looking to use crowdsourcing for developing new digital products and services.

• worked as a Java developer on the Starbytes Team
• done maintenance work on the crowdsourcing web app
  
  

CodeMotion Milan @Conference Attended yearly from 2014-present. In addition to the 2 day conference, joined yearly 1 or 2 full-day workshops.

Codersonly @Meetup Occasional dropping by.

Socrates Switzerland @Conference Attended yearly between 2017-present the 3 days retreat in the Swiss mountain alps 🫕🧀🛷.

Won a nomination for FoodPrint @Climathon Zürich (Sep 2018)
Our team built a web prototype that would take a picture of a menu and calculate for each dish the CO2 footprint and water consumption.

Context traits Dynamic behaviour adaptation through run-time trait recomposition (Mar 2013)
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD ’13)

Won 2nd Place with DoneeDonee @ Startup Weekend (Feb 2013)
The only developer in the team, implemented a Ruby-on-Rails prototype of a mock ecommerce service that reminds and suggest you the right gift for a person.

Romanian: Native
Italian: Native
English: C2
German: C1
French: B1

Master in Computer Science (cum laude)
Università degli Studi di Milano - Milan, Italy (2008 - 2012)

Erasmus exchange student program. Thesis work started here. In addition, done a B1 French course.
Université catholique de Louvain - Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (Fall 2010)

Bachler in Computer Science
Università degli Studi di Milano - Milan, Italy (2004 - 2008)

Learning how to play the piano 🎹, regularly reading books 📚 and occasionally doing trail runs 🏃🏻 in the mountains 🏔.