andrei neculau.com

about me

Senior Engineering Leader | 20+ years building reliable, scalable, and high-impact software solutions

I help teams design, deliver, and operate platforms that make software delivery faster, safer, and more reliable. My experience spans companies like Klarna, Cisco, Tobii and Schibsted/Vend, leading efforts across infrastructure, data, and developer platforms.

I code. github.com/andreineculau · github.com/ysoftwareab · github.com/for-GET

I care about outcomes. Clear goals, strong technical foundations, and teams that can move with confidence. I focus on reducing friction, improving developer productivity, and building systems that scale well without adding unnecessary complexity. Engineering leadership, platform strategy, reliability, developer experience, and data-driven delivery are my focus areas.

What my team, peers and managers are saying

• "I think you are quite unique in being as technical as you are and at the same time being a people manager."
  
• "You manage to balance technical depth with leadership in a way that builds a lot of trust."
  
• "I always feel that expectations are very clear, even when the situation itself is complex."
  
• "You give people space to think and decide on their own, but you are also present when guidance is needed."
  
• "You are very good at creating psychological safety in the team."
  
• "I appreciate that you don't shy away from difficult conversations."
  
• "It feels like you genuinely care about both the delivery and the people."
  
  Driving philosophy
  
  "A job well done gives inner satisfaction and is the foundation upon which society rests."
  sv. "Ett väl utfört arbete ger en inre tillfredsställelse och är den grund på vilket samhället vilar." - Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton

2026 - ____ Codento AB, Stockholm, SWE Lead Cloud Architect

Google Leads in AI. We Lead in Google Cloud.

Lead Cloud Architect on Data/AI and AppDev engagements.
Advisory and delivery on Google Cloud - data platforms, applied AI (Gemini, Gemini Enterprise), and cloud-native architectures (serverless, event-driven) with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and security by design (IAM, GDPR). Supporting the sales organization and the Google partnership.

Internally: recruiting, sharing knowledge, and shaping practices and structure - with a growing focus on AI tools, models, plugins, and skills.
And the human side: servant leadership, humble discussions, and quietly weaving our 3 Nordic offices closer together, day by day.

gcp, gemini, gemini enterprise, cloud architecture, serverless, event-driven, data platforms, platform engineering, prompt engineering, advisory

2022 - 2026 Vend AB / Blocket AB, Stockholm, SWE Sr Engineering Manager

Tech Data Platform | Vend, formerly known as Schibsted Nordic Marketplaces | Blocket is Sweden's biggest marketplace.

Led 4 teams (19 engineers, 7 of them consultants; hired 2) running the data platform behind all Nordic marketplace brands - Blocket, DBA, FINN, Oikotie, Tori, and more.

Inherited 5 data warehouses with thinly spread, barely monitored integrations. Left behind a federated, self-serve platform: thousands of dbt models over hundreds of sources (Kafka, multi-cloud blob storage, direct connectors, API snapshots), 200,000+ pipeline runs a year at 97%+ success. Snowflake cataloged the setup as agile and federated. Onboarding a new data source went from days or weeks to 1 hour, via templates and golden paths.

Owned a 7-figure yearly Snowflake spend (amplitude's contract even larger) and drove ~4x cost-efficiency gains - spend grew ~5% a year while the platform grew several-fold. Through layoffs and the Schibsted-to-Vend spin-off, the team stayed intact and topped the org's health metrics, the lighthouse among 10 teams.

people management, servant leadership, change management, data engineering, snowflake, dbt, amplitude, tableau, matillion, kafka, aws, gcp, terraform, docker, evidence

2020 - 2023 Y Software AB, Saltsjöbaden, SWE Founder

Consultant. Self-employed

2020 Normative/Meta Mind AB, Stockholm, SWE Lead Backend Engineer

Normative is about "Sustainability Reporting Made Really Easy".

2016 - 2020 Tobii Pro AB, Stockholm, SWE Software Engineer in AdTech (Lead)

I'm a core part of Tobii ATTEX (formerly Pro Pulse).

Pulse is a unique service that captures >5GB worth of online attention data a day,
from >1200 people that are passively browsing the Swedish online,
extensively monitoring metrics related to the ads and brands that they are exposed to.

Tobii Pro is the research solution division within Tobii.
We help business and science professionals gain real insights into human behavior with leading eye tracking solutions and services.

aws, gitops, devops, infrastructure as code, http, node.js, es6/typescript, travisci/circleci/github-actions/teamcity/jenkins/katt, git, erlang

2016 - 2020 Tobii Pro AB, Stockholm, SWE Platform Engineer on AWS (Lead)

Built Tobii Pro's cloud platform where none existed - previous consultants had failed to deliver one - and carried ~80% of it as we grew from 3 people to almost 30 in 2 teams shipping 3 products on it.

End-to-end, everything infrastructure as code: browser extension and eye-tracker integration, ingestion (Kinesis Firehose, API Gateway, Lambda), cloud storage and ELT, analysis (Athena), presentation, monitoring. About 3,000 USD/month in cloud costs, thanks to architecture over hardware.

Several uneventful deployments a day, for everyone including juniors, across dev/pre/prod. In four years, exactly one incident worth the name - a data-resend bug, caught immediately.

Grew the service from 0 to 1,000+ panelists and tens of GB ingested and analyzed daily. Survived multiple product pivots with little effort - the platform bent instead of breaking. The visible result: watching, in real time, where a person actually looks on a website.

aws, serverless, lambda, api gateway, kinesis firehose, athena, infrastructure as code, cloudformation, terraform, gitops, devops, http, node.js, es6/typescript, travisci/circleci/github-actions/teamcity/jenkins/katt, git, erlang

2014 - 2016 Cisco Systems AB, Stockholm, SWE Software Engineer in Networking

Switched focus to backend and infrastructure: Erlang-based JSON-RPC API design and implementation, Jenkins infrastructure and the delivery pipeline for Continuous Integration, the migration from SVN to GIT (hosted on Atlassian Stash/BitBucket Server and Gitolite), tooling.

Still engineering Tail-f NCS, but within Cisco's Cloud & Virtualization Group.
Cisco acquired Tail-f in 2014 - read more.

erlang, yaws, http, json-rpc, yang, jenkins/bitten/lux/katt, multi vcs (svn, git, git-svn), multi platform…

2013 - 2016 Tail-f Systems AB, Stockholm, SWE UI Developer

Engineering Tail-f NCS with a mix of frontend/backend duties.

sencha/extjs, coffeescript, node.js

2001 - 2014 Life-Link Friendship-Schools, Uppsala, SWE IT handyman

Front- and backoffice duties. Designing and engineering 3 major websites.

php, asp, perl, css, js, sencha, photoshop, cms

2011 - 2013 Klarna AB, Stockholm, SWE Developer in FinTech

Designed the public REST API of Klarna Checkout - its core still 60-80% the same today, across 26 markets, 15 years later - and wrote the API documentation used by integrating merchants.

Checkout's whole pitch was "email + postal code, click buy" - so simple merchants couldn't trust it. I built a full front/backend FSM prototype that made the flow legible, and it became the sales tool that won merchant trust over the year the product was being built.

As the Checkout team grew from 4 to 20-30 people, I built support tooling for engineers to learn, explore and extend what the API exposed - then moved to a 10-person API team to design the Klarna Backoffice API.

rest, http, hypermedia, api, api design, fsm, js, coffeescript, sdk, gui, ux, i18n, l10n, testing, scripting, erlang

2010 - 2011 Media & News Stockholm AB, Stockholm, SWE System Developer

Engineering a customized social network on top of SocialEngine.

php, mysql, css, js, mootools, jquery, zend framework, socialengine

2000 - 2005 miscellaneous Web Developer/Designer

• 2002 - 2005 Island M.U.N.G.A., Isle of Wight, GBR
  
• 2002 - 2004 Romanian Red Cross, Galati, ROU
  
• 2004 Data-Soft S.A., Galati, ROU
  
• 2000 - 2004 Colegiul National "Vasile Alecsandri", Galati, ROU

perl, php, css, mysql, js, photoshop

education

2008 - 2010 Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SWE M.Sc.

Engineering and Management of Information Systems.

2007 University of Humanities and Economics, Lodz, POL Erasmus

Corporate Finance Management, H.R. Management, Social Role of Media, Public Discourses, Conflicts and International Negotiations

2004 - 2008 Romanian-American University, Bucharest, ROU B.Sc.

Computer Science for Business Management. Graduated with the highest GPA in the programme.