About
I started in February 2001 at Necomm, a small ISP in Iași, writing whatever the job needed in whatever language it needed. Then nearly three years at Medianet, which published Ziarul de Iași, as one of three network administrators looking after nine Linux servers and writing the software that ran the paper’s site. Then eight months at Cyclop building thematic search engines, which was the first time I worked on search and not the last.
In 2004 I joined Ubisoft’s mobile division, which later became AMA. The first thing I built there that mattered was a tool that read Java and wrote C++, because porting a game between the two took about six weeks and we had a lot of games. It got it down to two or three. I’ve been doing some version of that ever since.
Then five years at EA Mobile, from lead engineer to development director, shipping four to six titles a year and eventually responsible for over a hundred people through other managers.
The next three years were less of a straight line. Business development on mobile security products at certSIGN, then TreatDrop, a mobile payments and rewards app I founded, then a year consulting for SecurityCoverage, a US company starting its iOS practice.
After that: co-founder and CTO at Kalon, CTO at EveryMatrix, and since 2017 CTO at eJobs, Romania’s largest recruitment marketplace, where roughly one in twenty Romanians shows up in a given month.
I studied Computer Science and Automatic Control at “Gh. Asachi” in Iași. My thesis, in 2004, was speech recognition using neural networks, written in C and run on FreeBSD. Today that’s an afternoon on a laptop. That gap is most of what I find interesting about this moment.
The thing I’m actually trying to do hasn’t changed much since I first wrote it down in 2011: build a strong team and help them work as if it were their own business.
What I care about
Simplicity, mostly. Dijkstra had it right: simplicity is a great virtue, but it requires hard work to achieve and education to appreciate, and to make matters worse, complexity sells better.
I think there was never a better time to be a software engineer. AI made the job less boring and made learning it faster, and the people calling it a threat are either in denial or too busy to notice. I also think that if you can find most of the solution to your problem on ChatGPT or Claude, you’re probably working on the wrong problem. The hard ones are where the value is.
On infrastructure I’m boring on purpose. Cloud isn’t always right, hybrid usually is, and on-prem is badly undervalued. I run more of my own infrastructure than most people would consider reasonable.
Languages, on and off, for most of that time. Romanian is my first and English is the one you’re reading. Italian is close to fluent, and I can hold a conversation in French, Spanish and German. Greek, Serbian, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese and Mandarin all got as far as a sentence or two and stopped there. Norwegian lasted six months in 2022 for no good reason at all. Danish since July 2025 is the current one: B1 diploma, four hours a week with a native teacher, B2 in October and C1 in January if it goes to plan.
Writing
There’s about eight years of it here, going back to 2018. Mostly how to run engineering, how to decide things, and what machine learning actually looks like in a marketplace once you stop talking about it.