Luca Matei

I build the whole thing. Usually alone.

Fourteen years writing code. Three of them contracting for startups in Europe and the US. Two of the products I built were bought. I do the frontend, the backend, the AI, and the servers underneath.

hello@lucamatei.eu CV ↓Résumé PDF ↓

Selected Work

A few things I built. The pattern is the same every time: I take the whole stack, and I finish.

Citana Travel

ACQUIRED

conversational booking, white-labelled

AI-native travel. One conversation becomes a whole trip — live flight inventory, hotels and boutique stays, booked end to end with no search form anywhere. The same stack runs white-label storefronts for partner travel brands, with an operator console behind them. Two founders: one on deals and partnerships, me on every line of the engineering and most of the product.

TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Duffel · LLM orchestration

Sole engineer from the first commit to the sale, and the one making most of the product calls. My cofounder brought the deals. Incubated at Press On Ventures, acquired by Skylark in 2026. I went with it.

citanatravel.com

getit.ai

ACQUIRED

multi-modal RAG at scale

Live AI shopping for e-commerce brands. Creators become personal shoppers inside the store — their voice, their video avatar, their pitch — with product knowledge underneath and a system that learns which version of the story sells. I became the person they came to for anything: full stack, infrastructure, Shopify.

Python · FastAPI · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · ClickHouse · Shopify · AWS

Took RAG queries from 300ms to under 12ms. Built a multi-tenant Shopify integration that keeps 6,000+ products and 150,000+ daily transactions in sync, live. Bought by private equity in 2025.

getit.ai

Optura AI

SHIPPED

HIPAA-compliant healthcare automation

An enterprise platform that makes healthcare AI prove it works. It plugs into a hospital system's live operational data, builds an ontology of the organisation, runs agents against it, and measures the return on every initiative. Backed by Salesforce Ventures.

TypeScript · Svelte · LangGraph · Terraform · AWS

I designed the ingestion pipelines that turn messy enterprise data into something the agents can use, and built the LLM guardrails that redact personal data and keep it HIPAA-compliant.

optura.ai

Testimonials

What other people say, which counts for more than what I say. Trimmed where they ran long, translated where they weren’t in English. All six are in full on LinkedIn.

Luca Matei is an absolutely exceptional fullstack developer, and one of the most capable and reliable professionals I've had the pleasure to work with. His technical depth, particularly in Python, is outstanding. … Luca thrives in complexity. No challenge seems to phase him; in fact, he often tackles the hardest problems head-on with remarkable calm and efficiency. … He is, quite simply, exceptional.

Lio MendoncaCTO and founder · Managed me directly · April 2025

Should Luca apply to a job at your company, you would be stupid not to hire him!

Patrick LauberCreator of django-cms · Managed me directly · May 2025

Had a couple of both backend and frontend sessions where Luca demonstrated how things work in both areas of an app, with great examples. … You can quickly notice that he possesses a lot of knowledge about the subjects covered.

Alexandru Laurentiu FanaruAnalyst at FNZ · Client · April 2025

I had the chance to talk with Luca about Python and LLM models, and his explanations were very clear and easy to understand. He helped me see more clearly which directions I can take as a junior, and gave me valuable tools and perspectives. I recommend him with confidence to anyone who needs guidance or collaboration in tech and AI.

Ghizu Antonio NicolasAssociate at Orizont One Residence · Client · May 2025Translated from Romanian

Luca is a genuinely interesting guy, with a strong drive to develop himself and to share with others. … He gave freely of his knowledge on every curiosity and question I had about Python and LLMs, and afterwards sent me an email full of documentation and know-how that saved me a lot of research time.

Misoc IaniFrontend developer, React and Next.js · Client · April 2025Translated from Romanian

I recently had the pleasure of talking with Luca about a project I'm working on at the moment, one I needed guidance for. The conversation was pleasant and useful, with pertinent answers to the questions I asked. I appreciated the openness he brought to the meeting, and the solutions he offered.

Bogdan VulugaAutomotive technical trainer · Client · April 2025Translated from Romanian

Experience

Everything, newest first. All of it remote. All of it contract. Some of it came through Upwork: $30K earned there, logged by the platform rather than claimed by me. I don’t take work through it anymore, but the record is public.

Download the CV (PDF)

Senior Full Stack Engineer — Skylark

Aug 2026 – Present · Remote, Contract · New York, US

Skylark is a tech-forward luxury travel agency: 4,000+ vetted hotels, 90,000+ travelers, real advisors behind the booking platform. It acquired Citana Travel, and me with it.

LLMs · TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Redis

Joined through Skylark's acquisition of Citana Travel — the product I was the sole engineer on, first commit to sale
Leading the engineering on the AI booking side: the agent, the storefront, and the infrastructure under both
Same scope as before, bigger surface: frontend, backend, LLM orchestration, production infrastructure

Forward Deployed Engineer — Your AI Department

May 2026 – Present · Remote, Contract · San Francisco, US

An AI strategy and implementation firm run by ex-Google and ex-Meta AI leads and exited founders, and a registered Claude Partner Network company. Forward-deployed engineers embed inside client companies, ship production AI, and hand it back.

LLMs · MCP · Python · TypeScript · Vector search · Evals

Built the automations for a financial advisory firm, replacing manual back-office work with systems that run unattended
Built evaluation and observability in from day one, so the client's own team could run and extend the systems after handover

Founding Engineer — Press On Ventures

May 2025 – Aug 2026 · Remote, Contract · New York, US

Citana Travel, an AI travel startup incubated at Press On Ventures. Two of us: a cofounder out of Samsung and FAANG on deals and partnerships, and me on the entire engineering and most of the product. Acquired by Skylark in 2026.

LLMs · TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Duffel

Sole engineer on the whole product: the conversational booking agent, white-label storefronts for partner travel brands, the operator console, the multi-agent AI backend
Made most of the product calls with very little oversight — what got built, what got cut, what the agent should actually say. My cofounder brought the deals and the partnerships
Wired up live flight inventory through Duffel and hotel partners, so every price and confirmation was real, in seconds
Auth, payments, LLM orchestration, observability, production infrastructure. All of it mine

Senior AI Engineer — Optura AI

May 2025 – Jul 2025 · Remote, Contract · Cluj, Romania

Enterprise healthcare AI, backed by Salesforce Ventures. I built the orchestration layer that turns a hospital system's operational data into something agents can act on, and the automation that keeps it HIPAA-compliant.

Terraform · Svelte · AWS · LangGraph · TypeScript

Designed the pipelines that turn unstructured healthcare data into something usable, at scale
Built the LLM guardrails that redact personal data and satisfy HIPAA
Shipped full-stack features across a Svelte frontend and AWS infrastructure

Senior Full Stack Engineer — getitAI, Inc.

Oct 2023 – May 2025 · Remote, Contract · San Francisco, US

Early engineer at a live AI shopping platform, where creators sell inside a brand's store as personal shoppers. I became the person they came to for anything: the stack, the infrastructure, the Shopify side. Bought by private equity in 2025.

Python · FastAPI · TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Shopify · AWS · ClickHouse

Built a multi-modal RAG system on Redis Stack vector search. Queries went from 300ms to under 12ms
Architected a multi-tenant Shopify integration that syncs 6,000+ products and handles 150,000+ daily transactions in real time
Ran infrastructure and DevOps: CI/CD, production deploys, and a feature-rollout system split by geography
Shipped LLM tools for cart management, subscription processing, and agentic product-knowledge retrieval

Python Developer with DevOps — Signed NDA

Jul 2023 – Apr 2024 · Remote, Contract · The Netherlands

Contract work on the backend and infrastructure for a SaaS API. The client is under NDA.

Python · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · Redis · Linux · HAProxy · Docker

Architected a distributed multi-server system for high request volume, load balanced with HAProxy
Rewrote the core API for speed and reliability, and added a usage-based credit system with subscription billing
Ran the whole infrastructure: self-hosted CI/CD, database clusters, hardened servers. 99.9% uptime

Volunteering

Front of House, Stage Crew — Cuibul Artiștilor

Jul 2026 – Present · Arts and culture · Bucharest, Romania

Cuibul Artiștilor is an independent Bucharest theatre making immersive, intimate work.

Front of house on performance nights — welcoming and seating audiences, hospitality
Stage prep, get-in and get-out, and general support for the team and the cast during runs
Built the theatre's check-in system, now used at the door for every performance. Rebuilding the rest of their technical stack

The longer version, and the rest of what I do that doesn’t pay, is on Outside work.

Education & credentials

Self-taught. 15 years of programming, learned from open-source code, developer tools, and whatever I could find
Certified Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance
Accountant, APSAP (Romania)
Colegiul Național „Mihai Viteazul”, București. Mathematics and Computer Science

Approach

I’m most useful when the brief is vague and the stack is wide.

Give me an idea. I’ll work out what it should be, build every layer, then make it reliable. That last part takes the longest.

AI took the boring half of the job. That doesn’t make the job smaller. It moves it. The hours go into what to build and what to cut. At Citana those were mostly my calls, and the engineering was better for it — you build a different system when you also decided what it’s for.

Build the smallest version. Put it in front of something real. Change it the same day. Most of what I assume about a problem is wrong, and shipping is how I find out. I’d rather be wrong by lunch than right in a month.

I’ve nearly always been the only engineer, or the first. So I choose boring over clever. Boring keeps running when nobody is watching.

I take contract work when it interests me. I’d take the right full-time job. Either way: send me the problem. That tells us more than talking about me.

Contact

Write to me: hello@lucamatei.eu.

Also here: GitHub · LinkedIn · Telegram

The rest of me — the essays, the non-work half — is back home.