About
The full arc
I joined Fashion Days in 2012 as a PHP developer building ecommerce backends. Over 15 years I grew through team leadership into an AI/ML engineering detour — building visual similarity search and recommendation engines — before stepping into management and eventually owning the full engineering org as IT Director.
Today I lead 60 people across product, engineering, infrastructure, data, mobile, and QA at Fashion Days — one of Romania's largest ecommerce groups. I'm a hands-on leader who never stopped caring about the technical layer underneath.
Experience
15 years at one company
One company, four distinct chapters — from PHP developer to IT Director.
IT Director
Fashion Days2022 — Present
- ▸ Lead a 60-person engineering org spanning product, infrastructure, data & analytics, mobile, and QA — 10 direct reports
- ▸ Designed overall cloud architecture and led full on-premise → cloud migration — actively participated in implementation including CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes migrations, and infrastructure design; eliminated hardware maintenance overhead and accelerated delivery cycles
- ▸ Own annual Black Friday delivery — hands-on performance testing and capacity planning for 20× BAU traffic spikes, coordinating across engineering, infrastructure, and commercial teams under high-pressure timelines; consistent clean delivery record across multiple years
- ▸ Drove tech stack modernisation from PHP to Go on Kubernetes across all new services, improving developer ownership and deployment velocity
- ▸ Actively conduct architecture reviews and technical design sign-off across all engineering teams — maintaining hands-on technical engagement at the director level
- ▸ Actively piloting GenAI engineering workflows — experimenting with AI coding tools and context-aware automation to improve developer productivity across teams
- ▸ Restructured engineering org around Engineering Manager and Architect roles — resolved delivery bottlenecks and knowledge concentration risk; resulted in faster shipping and measurably improved quality
- ▸ Negotiate engineering capacity trade-offs with commercial and product leadership — secured dedicated bandwidth for infrastructure and platform stability alongside feature delivery, preventing short-term pressure from compounding long-term technical risk
- ▸ Own infrastructure security posture, incident response, and data protection/privacy engineering across the platform
Team Manager — Search & Personalisation
Fashion Days2020 — 2022
- ▸ Led 2 cross-functional product/engineering teams (14 people) — owned both product direction and technical execution for search, listings, and personalisation
- ▸ Replaced legacy commercial search & listings solution with a fully in-house built platform — led development end-to-end from architecture to delivery
- ▸ Built personalisation capabilities from scratch: recommendation widgets and dynamic content that transformed a previously static shopping experience into a data-driven discovery engine
AI/ML Engineer & Team Lead
Fashion Days2017 — 2020
- ▸ Built visual similarity search and recommendation engines for the fashion catalogue — among the top CTR-performing engines on the platform to this day
- ▸ Hands-on ML engineering across the full stack: model training, large-scale vector similarity search, and production deployment — while leading a small team
Team Leader & PHP Developer
Fashion Days2012 — 2017
- ▸ Built ecommerce backend systems (ERP, PIM, inventory, WMS integrations) and progressed to leading the backend teams that owned them
Skills
What I bring
Leadership & Org
Cloud & Infrastructure
Security & Compliance
AI / ML & GenAI
Engineering
Education
Academic background
BSc Computer Science
Coventry University, United Kingdom
2011