Open to opportunities

Vlad Radulescu

@pacmakaveli

Message

Experienced Ruby on Rails principal engineer focused on scalable systems and team growth.

United Kingdom

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm looking for hands-on engineering roles at startups where I can mentor teams, own architecture, ship scalable features, and balance speed with reliability.
But, that doesn’t mean I won’t take a role in more, well established, businesses.

I'm a hands-on principal engineer and founder who builds scalable web platforms, leads engineering teams, and ships pragmatic solutions under real-world constraints. I’ve architected and maintained high-throughput systems (games.directory), built marketplaces with Stripe/KYC integrations, and implemented search and realtime features for production workloads.

I value experimentation, mentorship, and practical performance tuning — moving fast while keeping reliability. I enjoy mentoring engineers, owning complex features, and guiding technical strategy for startups and high-growth products.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Founder / Freelance Engineer

Current

Studio51

Jan 2022 - Present (3 years 8 months)

Founded a freelance studio delivering architecture, integrations and feature development for clients (Homey, Docterz, GamingStars), led major features, search optimisation and hybrid app migrations while scaling engineering teams.

Stripe Elasticsearch API Development Scalability

Current

Chief Dabbler Officer

Current

games.directory

Jan 2014 - Present (11 years 8 months)

Founded and scaled a Rails-based gaming platform to serve over 2 million users, evolving the codebase to modern Rails, building APIs and AI-powered tools, and operating high-throughput data ingestion and performance-optimised systems.

Ruby Rails PostgreSQL Elasticsearch API Design Performance Optimization Data Ingestion

Principal Software Engineer

GoGreen Managed / SmartED-iTORS

Jan 2014 - Dec 2022 (8 years 11 months)

Progressed from junior PHP engineer to principal role, building numerous Rails-based products (marketplace, CRM, mobile PWAs) and driving pragmatic engineering trade-offs to ship features and scale core business products.

Ruby on Rails PHP Ionic PWA Stripe Integration PostgreSQL API Design

Contract Developer

GVA Acuity

Jan 2012 - Dec 2013 (1 year 11 months)

Built an internal PHP/MySQL tool to digitise surveys and forms, reducing multi-week processes to hours and improving operational efficiency; emphasised careful requirements gathering and testing.