Andrei Ursuleanu Book a call

Senior software engineer · backend architecture and reliability · platform engineeringBrașov, Romania · EU citizen · remote

Every platform has problems the team learned to live with.

They sit between systems. Between teams. Between code and business. Nobody owns them. They are expensive, and they get more expensive the longer they stay.

I find them, build the fix, and make the better path the default.

99.5% → 99.99%
availability of the observability platform at Adobe
~10,000
person-days a year of manual work automated at Dennemeyer
10x
faster critical paths at Eved while the client base doubled

Selected results

~10,000
person-days a year of manual trademark-renewal work automated at Dennemeyer, built inside the existing .NET monolith after a multi-year greenfield rewrite had failed.
Dennemeyer · 2018-2022
99.5% → 99.99%
availability of the Prometheus-based observability platform at Adobe Experience Platform, a fleet of more than a thousand instances whose cost and reliability I owned.
Adobe · 2023-2025
4 h → 12 min
for the build step of Dennemeyer's deployment pipeline; the whole flow, build, tests and deployment, went from a working day to under an hour and became the organisation's default path.
Dennemeyer · 2018-2022
10x
faster critical paths on Eved's event-payments platform while the client base doubled and data volume grew 5x.
Eved · 2016-2018
~€20,000 / day
(~€7M a year) of untracked losses made visible for a Romanian gaming operator with thousands of locations, through the observability and audit tooling I built.
JoyDev engagement · 2017
~100,000
monthly active users at peak and 20 paying dealerships on Carmira, my own automotive product, taken from idea to a live platform.
Carmira · 2021

Why these problems stay expensive

Platform problems persist not because teams are weak. They persist because of how organizations work.

The cost hides in the gap between systems. No single team sees it. No single dashboard shows it. It accumulates quietly in defaults that outlived the reason they were set.
The risk hides in the gap between teams. A change every team must make by hand fails in the one place nobody checks, and stays invisible until it breaks.
The fix fails because it stays a one-time repair. Someone fixes the incident. The incident comes back. Nobody changed the default. Nobody built the guardrail. The team goes back to firefighting.
The real problem is not effort. It is visibility, ownership, and the right default. Most platform problems are already known. What is missing is someone who maps the full picture, builds the fix, and makes it stick.

What I do about it

I work on the problems that are already expensive, already crossing team boundaries, and already being avoided. The work is always the same shape: find what is actually broken, build the fix and the guardrails together, and leave the better path easier than the old one.

Platform cost
Spend hidden in default behavior. I trace the allocation model, find where the cost actually sits, and redesign the default so the lower-cost path runs without anyone thinking about it.
Reliability and self-healing
Platforms where on-call is heavy and incidents repeat. I build self-healing automation and monitoring standards that make the platform recover without human intervention.
Migration risk
Migrations that need an edit in every tenant. I replace change-per-entity approaches with configuration models that make the move safe at scale.
Performance under growth
Critical paths that degrade as data grows. I profile, redesign, and build the discipline - budgets, automation, guardrails - so performance stays up even as volume multiplies.
Monolith modernization
Systems where a greenfield rewrite already failed. I build the solution inside the existing system instead of pretending the constraints are optional.
Operational visibility
Money leaking, but nobody can see where. I map the full chain and build the observability layer that makes the loss visible for the first time.
Backend services
APIs and services that must stay fast and correct as load grows. I design and build them in C#/.NET, with the data model, caching and asynchronous paths that keep the critical paths fast.

What stays after I leave

The fix outlasts my time on the team. The platform defaults change. The team's capability grows.

Guardrails that catch the anti-pattern automatically.
Practices the team continues without me.
Defaults that run on their own - teams opt out, not opt in.
People who grew through the work and own the solution.

How the work moves

Question the premise before building.
Map the whole system before choosing the fix.
Build the fix and the guardrails together.
Leave the better path easier than the old one.

I formalized this pattern as QSAIL.

Explore QSAIL

Where this work sits

  • Observability and reliability
  • Platform cost and capacity
  • Migration risk
  • Performance under growth
  • Monolith modernization
  • Developer platform and CI/CD friction
  • Regulated or audit-heavy environments
  • Enterprise multi-tenant platforms
  • From embedded devices to cloud infrastructure
Languages and frameworks: C#/.NET (through .NET 10), ASP.NET Core; TypeScript/JavaScript, React; Java, Go, Python, Kotlin; C/C++, Objective-C/Swift.
Backend and data systems: REST APIs, SQL Server, Entity Framework, relational databases, query optimisation, materialised views, time-series databases, Redis, Kafka, WebSockets.
Architecture and performance: distributed systems, system design, asynchronous and event-driven architectures, concurrency, eventual consistency, caching, scalability, performance profiling and load testing (k6).
Cloud, platform and delivery: AWS, Azure (App Service, Functions, Service Bus, Storage), Kubernetes (EKS, Azure), Docker, Helm, Argo; CI/CD, build and release engineering, GitHub Actions, Jenkins.
Production operations: on-call and incident response, postmortems, release validation and staged rollouts, SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, capacity and cost planning, disaster recovery.
Observability: Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace, Application Insights; alerting and monitoring standards, distributed tracing.
Embedded and connected systems: embedded software, hardware/software integration, device communication, connected-TV systems, industrial automation and IoT integration.
AI-assisted engineering: Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents, multi-agent workflows, MCP and tool integration, evaluation workflows (evals), production RAG assistant.

Where I have worked

A hands-on senior software engineer who designs, builds and runs backend and shared platform services, owning their reliability, performance and cost. Since 2005, my work has spanned embedded software, user-facing Smart TV applications, enterprise .NET systems and high-throughput distributed cloud platforms. I connect technical decisions to developer workflows, production operations and the end-user experience, translating recurring problems into shared engineering infrastructure, automated quality gates and standards adopted across teams. The recurring pattern: take a system in production, find the expensive problem, fix it at the root and make the fix the default. Since 2025, I have used AI coding agents daily and designed evaluation workflows to verify their output.

Across enterprise SaaS, fintech and banking, intellectual-property services, healthcare, scientific instruments, semiconductor test, pay-TV and media, event payments, automotive, e-commerce and gaming. I stay close to the code, the system, and the operating model.

Adobe Senior Software Development Engineer
06/2023 - present · Remote, Romania

Adobe Experience Platform. Teams own their services end to end: code, instrumentation, production operation and on-call.

Edge Ingestion, since 09/2025. Backend and reliability engineering on a core Edge Network service. Split the service's operational and analytical metrics into two lanes, so that alerting and autoscaling run on a lean, reliable signal and the analytical detail lives apart from it: more reliable operational monitoring and room to scale. Owned the end-to-end test framework used for release validation and defined and instrumented the ingestion SLIs and SLOs; delivered distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry across the request path, with sampling controlled at runtime.

System Observability, 06/2023 to 08/2025. Owned the cost and reliability of the Prometheus-based monitoring stack used by engineering teams across Adobe Experience Platform and other Adobe organisations, a fleet of more than a thousand Prometheus instances; hands-on in configuration, CI/CD and code (Java, Go, Python). Analysed what the fleet's tenants actually used and set safe minimum CPU, memory and disk defaults from it, with per-namespace overrides for heavier workloads; the defaults apply automatically to every new tenant. Designed horizontal and vertical Prometheus scaling and built the auto-configuration layer that applies it. Availability from 99.5% to 99.99%, through alert filtering and prioritisation, self-healing automation, error budgets, restricted change periods and wave deployments; led postmortems. Wrote the alerting and monitoring guidelines most of the tenant teams adopted on recommendation, through reviews, office hours, onboarding and training across the organisation; designed the organisation-wide move to a new alert-routing platform as one configuration line per team.

FintechOS Senior Software Developer → Tech Owner, Core Banking Platform
02/2022 - 01/2023 · Remote, Romania

A Series-B platform on which banks and insurers build and launch financial products; clients included BRD, Banca Transilvania, Erste, Vodafone and Vienna Insurance Group. Initiated and built the NuGet package build system the company adopted: templates, versioning and breaking-change rules, and dependency pipelines that rebuilt and retested only the affected packages, wired into GitHub Actions. Introduced the SLI/SLO measurement criteria and the bottleneck-discovery and profiling method (Application Insights) the performance team worked by. Tech Owner after six months: technical lead for five backend developers, whose code-review standards I set, and the coordination point for ~40 people across business and technical teams; technical driver of a product letting non-technical users automate core-banking processes (Flowable BPMN engine).

Dennemeyer Senior Software Developer → Lead Developer, Intellectual Property Platform
01/2018 - 02/2022 · Brașov, Romania (remote from 2020) and Luxembourg

Global intellectual-property services group; DIAMS iQ, its enterprise .NET platform, for clients including Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Volkswagen. Owned the design and build of the trademark-renewal automation inside the existing monolith, after a multi-year greenfield rewrite had failed: ~10,000 person-days a year of manual work removed, and the people it freed moved into new business areas. Redesigned the delivery flow end to end, build, tests and deployment, from a working day to under an hour, the build step from four hours to twelve minutes; it became the organisation's default path. Led a development team on the renewal automation and, from 2020, served on the Engineering Steering Committee, the deciding body for technical direction, KPIs and engineering standards across the ~50-person software department over four countries; introduced performance testing (k6, from zero, run daily) and CI/CD validation gates for the whole department, proposed by me and adopted through the committee. Built the Grafana dashboards that directors and VPs used for oversight and engineers used during incidents.

Eved Performance Software Architect
05/2016 - 01/2018 · Brașov, Romania

Enterprise SaaS for event and entertainment payments: one shared .NET platform on AWS, clients including Apple, Dell and PwC. One of four architects; owned code-level performance across a ~40-person engineering organisation. 10x faster critical paths while the client base doubled and data volume grew 5x, through asynchronous communication, eventual consistency for non-critical paths, in-memory caching and materialised views. Set the performance rules every implementation passed through in review, and built the IQueryable guardrail that flagged unfiltered database calls before code review and became the team standard.

IBM Senior Software Developer, Mobile iOS
09/2015 - 05/2016 · Brașov and Bucharest, Romania

Built the iOS framework and application for an encrypted mailbox for confidential medical documents, the system that became Germany's electronic patient record (ePA).

Waters Corporation Software Developer → Team Lead
12/2014 - 08/2015 · Brașov, Romania, with two weeks on site in Massachusetts

Took over an existing C++ and C# codebase on the Acquity liquid-chromatography line and led and trained the new Brașov team extending the US team: introduced Scrum and prototyped a UI test-automation suite.

3 Screen Solutions Senior Software Consultant, Smart TV
06/2011 - 12/2014 · Brașov, Romania and Stuttgart, Germany

Multi-screen TV technology for pay-TV operators; clients included Swisscom, Kabel Deutschland, Siemens, Roku and Vestel; the framework work behind 3Ready, 3SS's product platform. Microsoft Mediaroom for Swisscom (500K daily active users, ~50K concurrent at peak): C#/.NET backend performance engineering and client-channel optimisation (caching, local storage, prefetching) that cut server load and raised perceived client speed. Built an iOS framework for controlling multiple TVs from one device over GPS, WiFi and ultrasound, reverse-engineered from vendor behaviour when the documentation failed; native iOS and Android clients.

Earlier engineering roles
07/2005 - 05/2011 · Brașov, Romania

Siemens (healthcare IT), MoreTV Broadcasting (digital TV), Testmetrix (semiconductor test equipment), Decsoft (web and CAD software). At Decsoft, a ~10-person web and CAD software company, ran the development department as its Software Architect, a first leadership role with the hiring calls and the company's first version control and deployment processes; at MoreTV, the middleware layer between the user-interface code and the low-level drivers, a clean API boundary that was also the working bridge between the two teams.

Entrepreneurship
Carmira Founder, multi-dealership automotive SaaS (own product)
2019 - 2023 · Brașov, Romania

Took Carmira from idea to a live product with ~100,000 monthly active users at peak (2021): owned the product, its roadmap and its economics, and ran production operations. Cold-called ~200 dealerships and converted 20 into paying customers; rebuilt the marketplace around their feedback, adding the dealer CRM they asked for. Led a team of four, one engineer grown from intern to technical lead; drew a majority-stake investment offer from Romania's second-largest car-dealer group (2021).

JoyDev Founder / Software Architect
Brașov, Romania · a sole proprietorship from 2011, a company since 2018

Architecture, delivery, operations, hiring, sales and P&L; team of up to four. Parfumdreams, Douglas Group (2023): the modernisation of its multi-country e-commerce operation, storefront through warehouse, stock and courier systems, onto .NET Core microservices on Kubernetes. E-scooter rental platform (2018): end-to-end system design for a local investor, from the code to the hardware selection and its custom integration, with the vendor negotiations. Gaming-operator prize-flow audit (2017): for a Romanian land-based operator with thousands of locations, my observability and audit tooling found ~€20,000/day (~€7M/year) of untracked losses.

Founder and education

Founder

Built and operated my own product, Carmira (2019-2023): an automotive marketplace and dealer operations platform, with Automira, its used-car brand, from 2021. Full cycle: product, engineering, sales, contracts, support, P&L. Self-funded. Received a majority-stake investment offer from Romania's second-largest car-dealer group. It proved what technical roles rarely prove: I know what technical decisions cost outside engineering.

Education

🇺🇸 MIT Sloan School of Management - Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation, and Technology (2023-2025): twelve courses across management, strategy and innovation, and technology and operations, with the joint MIT–IMD course, Driving Strategic Innovation, at 🇨🇭IMD (2025)
Mastering Negotiation and Influence · Mastering Design Thinking · Inquiry-Driven Leadership · Data-Driven Teams · Innovator's DNA · Neuroscience for Business · Interpersonal Communication · Business Process Design for Strategic Management · Communicating Data Through Storytelling · Managing Product Platforms · Developing a Leading-Edge Operations Strategy · Driving Strategic Innovation
All twelve courses
MBA - Transilvania University of Brașov (2009-2011); dissertation: Organizational Change, Culture, and the Dynamics of Trust
BSc Electronics & Computer Science - Transilvania University of Brașov (2004-2009); diploma project: a real-time 3D-FFT encoder optimised with SSE and CUDA
“Grigore Moisil” National High School of Informatics, Brașov - intensive computer-science track (2000-2004)
  • ACSL (American Computer Science League): 2nd place internationally, high-school team competition (2004)
  • InfoEducație: special award at Romania's national software contest for a Logic Scheme Compiler, an independently developed and publicly released tool (2004)

Languages

Romanian (native) · English (professional working proficiency)

QA lead - managed the entire effort
Product owner - done right
VP - bigger picture
“Andrei is the type of the person who tries to always consider the bigger picture while tackling individual tasks. This perspective makes him particularly effective when given ownership of larger project modules where his experience and attention to detail leads to quality deliverables.”
Andrei Tudorica, VP of Product Engineering, FintechOS
“When I knew he was in charge of a review or coding a requirement I knew things will be done right.”
Virginia Claudon, Product Owner, Dennemeyer
“As an Architect, Andrei managed the entire effort in a professional fashion, taking the limits and goals of the implementation to success.”
Pavel Draganuta, Software Quality Assurance Lead, Eved

All recommendations on LinkedIn

Have a backend, reliability or platform problem?

I would like to hear about it, especially where something is already expensive or nobody has checked whether it is.

The first conversation is about the problem itself. The shape of the work becomes obvious after that.