Vadim Russu.

Sole engineer behind a multi-product insurance platform integrated with the entire Moldovan banking and government stack. Own architecture, infrastructure, and every shipping decision across mobile, web, customer cabinet, insurer portals, and backend.

• Built and own a monorepo of 20+ packages (mobile, web, cabinet, insurer portals, Firebase Functions v1 + v2, document/email/policy templates) — all as the only engineer.
• Built and launched the React Native + Expo mobile app from scratch (MobX-ST, NativeWind, MMKV, i18next for EN/RO/RU, Maestro E2E, EAS production builds). Drove 5× user and revenue growth in the months following launch.
• Integrated the full Moldovan digital-state stack: MConnect (gov eID), MSign (e-signature), MPay (gov payments), Casier (vehicle registry), plus MAIB, BPAY, and the new MIA Plăți Instant rail from the National Bank of Moldova.
• Integrated 4 insurance carrier APIs (Anta, Donaris, Grawe, Medical) behind a single product surface so customers see one platform, not a vendor matrix.
• Launched new products end-to-end: CASCO (the most configurable CASCO calculator on the Moldovan market — every coverage, deductible, and add-on customer-tunable) and Home Insurance. Six products live total: RCA, Green Card, Travel, Vignette, Medical, Real Estate.
• Built an AI support agent with RAG over client policy data — answers customer questions grounded in the actual policy and registry context, not generic templates.
• Built lapse-detection against the vehicle registry — proactive renewal nudges that prevent uninsured-driving incidents without notification fatigue.
• Built end-to-end testing infrastructure — most flows runnable locally, plus AI helpers that let coding agents verify their own changes against the real product before shipping.
• Maintain 100% uptime on a single-engineer rotation; cut cloud infrastructure cost in half via targeted optimization without sacrificing performance.

Embed with seed-stage founders whose AI-generated MVPs stalled before launch. Diagnose the business, fix the code, ship to App Store / Play Store / production. Three engagements to date, plus internal AI tooling for the firm.

• Marketplace for blue-collar service providers (Yelp-style network of trusted plumbers and tradespeople). Inherited a fully AI-generated codebase with critical bugs and dead code. Shrank the codebase, replaced custom billing with Stripe, hardened the mobile UX, and shepherded the iOS + Android apps through Apple and Google Play verification on the first submission.
• AI consumer coaching app (B2C, freemium). Audited the inherited codebase and found critical security issues including IDOR and authentication bypass — patched and verified before launch. Integrated RevenueCat for subscriptions, cleaned the codebase, and submitted to both stores.
• Multi-tenant fleet-management SaaS for truck shops (vehicle, repair, parts, and equipment-lending workflows). Client came with the idea only; I designed the multi-tenant architecture that lets them white-label the platform to resellers, and built the product to production.
• Built an internal MCP server that uses language servers to construct a code graph for the firm’s LLM agents — symbol-aware lookup and dependency tracing inside large monorepos.
• Stood up RAG + evaluation pipelines for internal AI tooling: cost, latency, and answer-quality tracking across model + retrieval-strategy variants.
• Operate as the technical half of business-to-shipped-product engagements: deep-dive the client's domain, propose what to cut and what to build, then build it.

• Shipped Facebook Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) end-to-end — designed and built the infrastructure that lets customers auto-generate creative across catalogs of thousands of products.
• Re-architected the catalog backend to handle large-volume customer feeds, unlocking campaign scale that was previously manual-only.
• Boosted app performance by 50% via targeted optimizations, including reworking the image proxy with HTTP streaming.
• Introduced unit testing to a team without any, drove coverage to 80%, and used LLM tooling to compress test-authoring time.
• Migrated authentication to modern OIDC standards across the platform.
• Built an internal code-review bot that cut average review turnaround from 2–3 weeks to 1–2 days.
• Took production on-call rotation. Mentored junior engineers through code review.

Founding engineer for the Calibra Lightbars. Owned firmware, hardware bring-up, and the color-science work. Ongoing advisory role today.

• Built the C++ firmware for the lightbars and a wireless dial controller with a circular LVGL UI — production-ready MVP in two months.
• Designed a color-mixing algorithm calibrated against a light spectrometer, and prototyped an OpenCV feature that auto-adjusts lighting from the user’s video feed.
• Drove the product through Indiegogo launch into customer hands; contributed to PCB design and component selection. Now advisory.

• Lead technical role for 3+ years. Grew the customer base 30× and was instrumental in closing $4M in angel funding.
• Built the operations CRM from scratch — collapsed multi-hour manual workflows into minutes for the sleep-school team.
• Shipped the React Native parent app: parent↔tutor chat plus integrations with hardware sleep aids, iOS + Android.
• Drove hardware R&D — reverse-engineered an IP camera into a smart baby monitor and prototyped a Bluetooth sleep light.
• Owned all major tech choices and stack composition (Vue, Nuxt, Node, Go, Python, React Native, GCP, AWS).
• Built early AI features: prompt-engineered chatbots and text summarization woven into the product experience.
• Set the engineering bar: code review, hiring, and mentoring of junior engineers.

• Co-founded the company; set technical direction and engineering culture from day one.
• Ran full project lifecycles — client discovery, scoping, build, launch, and post-launch ownership.
• Grew the engineering team to 15+ developers and stood up an internship program as a long-term talent pipeline.
• Built CI/CD pipelines that standardized testing and deployment across diverse client app stacks.
• Shipped mobile and desktop apps on cross-platform stacks to compress client time-to-market and cost.
• Owned the client-side conversation: translated business goals into scalable software.

• Built and maintained a PHP billing system integrated with Wirecard, Braintree, and PayPal.
• Built a mass-email campaign tool on Node.js + PostgreSQL at 2%+ conversion across hundreds of thousands of sends.
• Shipped Leaderpages — a mobile-first personal-page + lead-capture app on Angular 2, Ionic 2, and Node.js.