Vlad Berindei
Verified Expert in Engineering
Back-end Developer
Zürich, Switzerland
Toptal member since December 6, 2021
Vlad is a senior software engineer with 10+ years of experience building back-end services, distributed systems, and performance-critical software. He previously worked at Google on YouTube's Content ID infrastructure, helping scale video-matching systems by 10x across billions of uploads. His core expertise spans distributed systems, back-end architecture, algorithms, and building on top of LLM APIs.
Portfolio
Experience
- Algorithms - 10 years
- C++ - 10 years
- C - 10 years
- Linux - 6 years
- Back-end - 6 years
- Distributed Systems - 5 years
- Python - 3 years
- Multithreading - 3 years
Preferred Environment
C++, SQL, Python, Distributed Systems, Linux, Algorithms, Back-end, System Design, Go, Multithreading
The most amazing...
...experience I've had was helping scale YouTube's Content ID system 10x to detect video copies across billions of uploads.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Golf Genius Software
- Designed and implemented a new scoring engine replacing a 10-year-old system behind live tournament leaderboards, while reducing the scoring latency by around 60%.
- Developed back-end functionality for tournament management, including handicap analysis and scoring algorithms used in large-scale competitions.
- Designed and prototyped a payment processing platform integrating multiple providers, including Stripe, NMI, CardConnect, and Billhighway, behind a unified API for payments, authorizations, and refunds.
Founder and Software Engineer
DineIn
- Built and launched an AI-powered platform that aggregates and structures restaurant offers from websites, PDFs, and menus.
- Designed the end-to-end architecture, including automated data extraction, LLM-based normalization and validation, back-end services, web application, monitoring, and alerting.
- Integrated OpenAI and Anthropic APIs to automate the extraction of structured information from unstructured sources.
Software Engineer
- Designed and implemented projects that scaled YouTube’s highly distributed Content ID video-matching system by 10x, enabling copyright infringement detection across billions of uploads.
- Redesigned components of the live video scanning system to improve throughput and reliability for real-time copyright detection.
- Contributed to the migration of the video-matching pipeline to AI-based fingerprinting, improving matching accuracy and reducing false positives.
- Mentored interns, providing technical guidance on system design and implementation.
Software Engineer Intern
- Worked as part of the core services team, which owned the high-scale infrastructure.
- Designed and implemented a service that stores all user modifications and provides access to this data in near real-time.
- Automated a configuration pushing process based on Jira tickets.
Software Engineer Intern
- Designed and implemented a distributed algorithm for clustering videos that have been split into parts before being uploaded.
- Implemented a prototype where clustered videos were grouped in playlists and suggested to the user.
- Implemented a benchmark for evaluating precision and recall of the clustered videos.
Research Assistant
Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI
- Worked on TREMOLO-X, a parallel molecular dynamics software package.
- Designed and implemented a cache-optimization library in C based on Hilbert curves.
- Benchmarked and tested the algorithm on big data sets with millions of data points.
Experience
Video Clustering Algorithm
Cache Optimization Library
Payment Microservice
JSON Scanner
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of Bonn - Bonn, Germany
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Bucharest - Bucharest, Romania
Skills
Libraries/APIs
API Development, Stripe API, CardConnect, Stripe, Stripe Connect, Stripe Connect API, Resque, Redis Queue, Node.js, React, Google Cloud API, OpenAI API, Claude API
Tools
Git, Impala, CMake, Stripe Checkout
Languages
C, C++, SQL, Ruby, Python, CSS, Bash, Java, Go, C++17, C++14, Scala, JavaScript, HTML
Paradigms
Unit Testing, Microservices, Scalable Application, Testing
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Hadoop, Google Test, Apache Thrift
Platforms
Linux
Storage
Data Pipelines, HDFS, BigTable, Google Cloud Spanner, PostgreSQL, Redis, Redis Cache, Google Cloud
Other
Algorithms, Back-end, Mathematics, Multithreading, Performance Optimization, Scaling, Web App Development, Debugging, Scalability, Performance Improvement, RESTFul APIs, Asynchronous REST APIs, Scalable Architecture, Distributed Systems, NMI Payment Gateway, Data Processing, System Integration, Networking, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Space-filling Curve, System Design, Data Structures, Back-end Development, Front-end, Architecture, Full-stack, Full-stack Development, Stripe Payments, Front-end Development, Web Standards, Web Development
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring