Luca Matei

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

Personalized software consultancy offering technical guidance for projects, career development, and startup strategy. Operates on a value-based pricing model where clients determine compensation based on session impact and delivered value.

AI-powered search tool that lets users query OSRAM product specification documents in natural language. Built on a Redis vector database with hybrid semantic and keyword search for fast, accurate retrieval across technical PDFs.

Built before LLM-assisted programming and modern IaC tools like Ansible.

Full-stack infrastructure automation platform I built from scratch to manage my entire homelab — VM provisioning, networking, web app deployment, and server hardening. Exposes 65+ commands via CLI and GUI, driven by a custom templating engine across multi-environment deployments. Also includes a custom WSGI web framework with multilingual CMS and an SCSS design system.