Luca Matei

Seasoned impact-driven engineer with over 8 years of experience, recently collaborating with SaaS startups on a B2B basis. Designed and built high-traffic solutions while leading system development for AI-driven and scraping-based e-commerce products across global, agile teams. Creator of open-source IaC tool, WSGI web framework, and utility-first CSS library. Authored technical guides for a wide array of DevOps, networking and cybersecurity software. Guided students and junior developers in LLMs, web and game development, and procedural programming. Open-source contributor to Pydantic.

Senior / Middle Full Stack Engineer or Python Developer

Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Linux

• Performance: Rewrote a multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system using Redis Stack, reducing query response times from 300ms to under 12ms. Integrated keyword search, semantic search, metadata filtering, chunk joining, and query optimization
• Backend: Built asynchronous API infrastructure in Python using FastAPI, Postgres, Redis, SQLAlchemy, asyncio, and aiohttp.
• LLM Tools: Created tools allowing e-commerce actions like cart management, subscription handling, and order processing.
• Knowledge System: Designed an LLM-agnostic knowledge ingestion pipeline with interfaces integrated into the Next.js application. Can ingest files, web pages, Shopify products.
• Shopify Integration: Created a custom Shopify block for store integration and built pipelines to handle real-time updates for over 6,000 products and 150,000+ daily transactions across multiple stores.
• Scalability: Designed a user rollout system with geo-filtering and planned solutions for custom client requirements during onboarding.
• Testing and CI/CD: Created the first unit test suite and CI/CD pipeline to validate pull requests before merging.
• Team Coordination: Occasionally led daily meetings, coordinated 2-3 developers on projects, and managed production deployments.
• Documentation and Modularity: Reduced development time through modular architecture and improved onboarding with detailed documentation.
• Technical Support: Acted as the go-to engineer for resolving critical issues and implementing new features.

• Invited speaker on AI at a Packet Coders event
• Provided private tutoring on Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Advised startups on custom software solutions for employee timekeeping and network services
• Led weekly Python courses covering APIs, web scraping, and game development for junior developers
• Authored open-source learning materials
• Contributed to the Pydantic library
• Managed private Virtual Private Servers (VPSs) and DNS servers

• Reconstructed and launched a multi-server system to process high-volume custom user requests
• Rebuilt the API's core structure, improving speed, stability, and expandability
• Designed and implemented a comprehensive credits system for the API, integrating with external subscription services
• Established and managed essential infrastructure including CI/CD pipelines, load balancers, and databases
• Maintained servers to ensure security and minimize downtime

• Created configuration guides for over 10 software products
• Ran web development workshops for 25+ students twice a week
• Tutored 15+ students in web development and procedural programming
• Built dozens of websites, blogs, galleries in Flask, Django and bottle.py with Bootstrap, jQuery, and vanilla JS, HTML, CSS
• Built software for DevOps, networking and security products

This project was developed before the use of large language models in programming and before I discovered Ansible and TailwindCSS.

This tool is a complete Python-based solution for building and deploying virtual machines, networks, and web apps in a home lab. It features a command line interface with history and a Tkinter GUI, offering over 65 commands.

It can configure and manage Git repositories, uWSGI servers, Nginx web servers, Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, system services, Bind DNS servers, DHCP servers, SSH keys, GPG keys, PostgreSQL servers, nftables firewalls (with geo-blocking and port knocking), development, staging, and production environments, as well as preseed Debian virtual machines. Configurations are based on a custom templating system, with every setting carefully selected by me.

Websites are built on a custom web framework based on the WSGI application. They support multilingual content using a YAML-based CMS for managing static, blog, and gallery content.

The frontend of the websites uses a SCSS-based library for multimedia structure, spacing, color palettes, UI components, and animations.

When mentoring or teaching, I use engaging small projects to help kids, students, and juniors learn programming:

• Game Collection (Snake, Dino, AOTF): Introduces programming fundamentals with Pygame while encouraging them to handle edge cases to prevent bugs or cheating.
• URL Shortener: Demonstrates web development concepts with FastAPI, including intensive read-write operations with Redis, worker processes with Dramatiq, and analytics derived from web requests.
• AI Assistant: Teaches how to build a chat app using Next.js, incorporating conversation management with Postgres and Redis, prompt engineering, large language models (LLMs) with tool calling, and systems design.

• Certified Scrum Master through Scrum Alliance
• Accountant through APSAP (Romania)