Luca Matei

Romanian-born and raised in a lower-middle-class family, I began teaching myself web development more than 14 years ago. Over the past 8 years, I've worked as a freelancer, creating open-source full stack frameworks, developer tools, and educational resources, as well as contributing to community projects.
Since 2023, I've been an independent contractor for e-commerce startups across Europe and the US, travelling nomadically throughout the Benelux region. Recently, I've served as a Senior AI Engineer at a US healthcare startup and as a Founding Engineer at a VC-backed travel startup, while exploring my growing interest in psychology and philosophy.

Senior / Middle AI Engineer or Full Stack Engineer

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

Founding engineer at a VC-backed travel startup, building B2C and B2B platforms for AI-powered personalized itinerary booking

• Implemented role-based authentication with anonymous access, OAuth 2.0, and credential-based flows
• Built comprehensive B2B dashboard for transcript management, order processing, and platform administration
• Architected multi-agent LLM system for natural language flight booking automation
• Established observability framework tracking financial KPIs, performance metrics, and LLM token usage
• Configured production infrastructure including PostgreSQL, DNS, hosting, and SMTP services
• Authored technical architecture documentation and system design specifications

Built AI orchestration platform for enterprise healthcare data management and automation

• Designed and implemented ETL pipelines for processing unstructured healthcare data
• Built core platform features across full-stack architecture
• Configured LLM guardrails for PII protection and regulatory compliance (HIPAA)

• Engineered multi-modal RAG system using Redis Stack vector database, optimizing query latency from 300ms to <12ms
• Architected core asynchronous API infrastructure for high-throughput e-commerce operations
• Built LLM-powered tools for cart management, subscription processing, and order fulfillment
• Built agentic knowledge system integrating Shopify product catalogs with unstructured data from documents and web sources
• Created multi-tenant Shopify integration handling real-time synchronization of 6,000+ products and 150,000+ daily transactions
• Implemented feature rollout system with geographic segmentation and custom client onboarding workflows
• Collaborated cross-functionally with RevOps, led development standups, coordinated engineering team, and managed production deployments
• Established initial test automation framework and CI/CD pipeline for pull request validation

• Architected and deployed distributed multi-server system for high-volume request processing
• Refactored API core to improve performance, reliability, and scalability
• Implemented usage-based credit system with third-party subscription service integration
• Established self-hosted infrastructure including CI/CD automation, HAProxy load balancing, and database clusters
• Administered VPS infrastructure ensuring security hardening and 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.

Conversational AI interface leveraging Redis vector database for Retrieval-Augmented Generation from OSRAM product specification PDFs. Implements hybrid search combining semantic and keyword matching to deliver technical documentation through natural language queries.

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

Python-based infrastructure automation platform for homelab VM provisioning, network orchestration, and web application deployment. Features CLI with persistent history and Tkinter GUI, exposing 65+ management commands.

Manages complete infrastructure stack including Git repositories, uWSGI application servers, Nginx reverse proxies, Let's Encrypt certificate automation, systemd services, Bind DNS zones, DHCP configuration, SSH/GPG key management, PostgreSQL clusters, and nftables firewalls with geo-blocking and port knocking. Supports multi-environment deployments (dev/staging/prod) and automated Debian VM preseeding. All configurations driven by custom templating engine.

Includes custom WSGI-based web framework with multilingual support via YAML CMS for static content, blog posts, and media galleries.

Frontend built on SCSS component library providing responsive layouts, design systems, UI primitives, and animation utilities.

Self-taught programming for 14 years.

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

• Colegiul Național "Mihai Viteazul" București
• Mathematics and Computer Science