Bucharest, Romania
Self-taught engineer with 15+ years of programming experience. I started out building open-source frameworks, developer tools, and educational resources before moving into professional work. Over the past 6 years, I've worked as an independent contractor for startups across Europe and the US — most recently as the sole engineer at a VC-backed travel startup that was acquired in 2026, and as a Senior AI Engineer at a healthcare AI company. Based in Romania, working remotely. Interested in my work? Let's have a quick chat — book a time here: https://cal.com/lucamatei/discovery Last updated: March 2026
Sole engineer at Citana Travel, a VC-backed AI travel startup where I built the entire technical product from scratch. Acquired in 2026 by a strategic buyer in the luxury travel industry - Owned the entire technical build as the sole engineer — B2C booking platform, B2B admin dashboard, and multi-agent AI backend - Worked closely with the product lead to translate vision into a shipped product, handling all engineering from first commit to acquisition - Built end-to-end: authentication, payments, LLM orchestration, observability, and production infrastructure - Startup was acquired in 2026 by a strategic buyer in the luxury travel space
Senior AI engineer at a healthcare AI startup, building an orchestration platform for enterprise data management and HIPAA-compliant automation - Designed ETL pipelines for ingesting and structuring unstructured healthcare data at scale - Implemented LLM guardrails for PII redaction and HIPAA regulatory compliance - Delivered full-stack platform features across a Svelte frontend and AWS-backed infrastructure
Early engineer at an AI-powered e-commerce insights platform. Became the go-to engineer across the stack — owning full-stack dev, infrastructure, and Shopify integrations. Acquired by Private Equity in 2025 - Built multi-modal RAG system with Redis Stack vector search, cutting query latency from 300ms to under 12ms - Architected multi-tenant Shopify integration syncing 6,000+ products and processing 150,000+ daily transactions in real time - Owned infrastructure and DevOps — CI/CD pipelines, production deployments, feature rollout system with geographic segmentation - Shipped LLM-powered tools for cart management, subscription processing, and agentic product knowledge retrieval - Occasionally collaborated cross-functionally with RevOps, led standups, and coordinated the engineering team
Contract role building and operating backend infrastructure for a SaaS API product - Architected distributed multi-server system for high-volume request processing with HAProxy load balancing - Refactored the core API for better performance and reliability, and implemented a usage-based credit system with subscription billing - Owned the full infrastructure — self-hosted CI/CD, database clusters, VPS security hardening, and maintained 99.9% uptime