
Claudiu Gilcescu Ceia
Verified Expert in Engineering
Full-stack Developer
Alba Iulia, Romania
Toptal member since October 20, 2022
Claudiu is a senior full-stack developer with around 15 years of industry experience. He has built various projects, from marketing websites and applications for digital agencies to internal tools at Facebook, civic technology projects, and SaaS products. Claudiu is passionate about open source, developer experience, clean code, and maintainable software.
Portfolio
Experience
- JavaScript - 15 years
- React - 10 years
- GraphQL - 9 years
- Node.js - 8 years
- TypeScript - 7 years
- OpenAI API - 2 years
- AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) - 2 years
- Deno - 1 year
Availability
Preferred Environment
Fedora, Vim Text Editor, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), TypeScript, Redis, Python, Linux, Web & Mobile Applications
The most amazing...
...thing I've built is a GraphQL API powering all of the kopplr interfaces and providing a data bridge for merchants, providers, and partners.
Work Experience
Board Member
AI3
- Helped organize the 1st edition of the digital festival diffusion, which included 70 speakers from across Romania, panelists, retro IT expositions, and more.
- Organized and attended weekly CoderDojo sessions.
- Organized and attended weekly community meetups, alternating technical meetups (demos, stack presentations, etc.), and informal gatherings.
Senior Full-stack Developer | CTO
WhiteCity Code
- Built the GraphQL API for kopplr's website, using TypeScript, with the Node.js runtime and Amazon Neptune for the storage layer. This was the read service, communicating with the write services via Amazon SNS.
- Authored design documents outlining the high-level implementation strategy and key design resolutions for the larger decisions that had to be taken at a technical level concerning the API for kopplr's website.
- Reviewed all the code committed to the kopplr GraphQL API codebase, including a significant amount of front-end code.
- Handled most of the kopplr production releases, monitoring the deployment process, running migrations, summarizing the changelog, and keeping all stakeholders in the loop regarding progress.
- Wrote a data-fetching or data-entity layer for resource description framework databases, specifically Amazon Neptune at kopplr, including generating TypeScript code from declarative schemas and a query builder and privacy layer for entities.
- Built an AI-powered over-the-phone voice assistant that is able to register users and fulfill requests such as bookings, appointments, API integrations, and more.
- Built an AI-powered receipt-scanning back-end prototype using Amazon Textract, OpenAI, EdgeDB, and GraphQL.
Co-founder and President
CivicNet
- Founded CivicNet as a branch of CivicTech Romania to focus on the organization's open data and data visualization efforts.
- Defined the organization's mission and vision, original roadmap, infrastructure, development toolchain, and release process while still being the largest code contributor.
- Managed relationships with institutional and private partners before, during, and after building and launching our products.
- Helped financing efforts for our projects by finding sponsors, applying for grants, and reaching out to potential partners.
Co-founder
CivicTech Romania
- Founded CivicTech Romania together with other fellows from the GovITHub program to continue the mission of building open-source software dedicated to citizens.
- Defined the organization's mission and vision, roadmap, development toolchain, volunteer onboarding, and release process while still being the largest code contributor.
- Led several of the organization's initiatives, including projects built in partnership with the Alba Iulia City Hall and the Department for Emergency Situations.
- Talked about CivicTech Romania and what we did at TEDxAlbaIulia in 2018 and other smaller events.
- Received the Forbes 30 Under 30 award in recognition of our efforts.
Senior Software Engineer
123FormBuilder
- Implemented a code review process with Phabricator.
- Improved the CI/CD pipeline and deployment practices.
- Proposed and implemented good practices, from writing unit and integration tests to code style and better third-party dependency management.
Fellow
GovITHub
- Helped organize GovCamp at the Victoria Palace, the first hackathon open to the public in the government, during my first week of fellowship.
- Engaged as one of the main code contributors for projects built and launched during the program.
- Built and launched an iOS and Android mobile app one week before the 2016 parliamentary elections to show people the voting booths nearest to their location.
Software Engineer
Facebook (now Meta)
- Built the first prototype for what later became Facebook's internal CRM to replace Salesforce and continued working on the CRM while the team grew from five to over 20 engineers.
- Optimized the feature gating abstraction at Facebook, improving the global CPU usage by 1.6%.
- Onboarded new employees on the data abstraction frameworks used at Facebook.
- Engaged as part of the team that rebuilt the Facebook Developers Support Tool, radically improving the experience of building apps on Facebook.
- Participated as one of the main contributors to refactoring and updating old or deprecated code throughout the codebase.
- Helped steer early design decisions around Hack as part of the company's first few users of the language.
- Contributed to bringing HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) to Heroku via the first official HHVM buildpack.
Technical Manager
TBWA Worldwide
- Oversaw the agency's digital branch, managing outsourced teams in Ireland, Poland, and Romania for some of our projects and building in-house solutions when time constraints were too tight.
- Met with clients to define product specifications and discuss time and budget constraints.
- Managed a small team of in-house developers and designers, with several of our digital campaigns awarded at festivals like the DMA.
Lead Developer
Rothco
- Managed the internal development team of five members.
- Participated in client and internal meetings to assess technical requirements.
- Built Facebook apps and websites to complement the agency's marketing campaigns.
Web Developer
EightyTwenty
- Built most of the agency's digital projects for clients such as Nokia and Toyota and other prominent local brands such as RTE, UCD, and Meteor, as the only in-house developer.
- Participated in the Appys 2011, receiving seven out of eight nominations for the Social Media category.
- Engaged in internal and client meetings to assess various products' technical requirements.
Experience
Kopplr Merchant Service Console
Fiipregatit National Emergency Preparedness Platform
https://fiipregatit.ro/Meserii Interactive Map of Trade Schools
Cancer Atlas | Mapping Prototype
https://civicnet.github.io/cancer-atlas/#/Cancer Atlas | Data Processing Pipeline
https://github.com/civicnet/cancer-atlas-scripts/RoDiaspora React Native App
https://github.com/civicnet/rodiaspora/Disaster Visualization Atlas
https://github.com/civicnet/disaster-atlas/Heroku Buildpack for HHVM
https://github.com/facebookarchive/heroku-buildpack-hhvm/1977 Cutremur Earthquake Visualization
https://civicnet.github.io/cutremur77/#/Alba Iulia Smart City Presentation Website
https://github.com/civicnet/website-alba-iulia-smart-city/Translation Detector
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/detect-translation/Redis Hexastore
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/redis-hexastore/FNV-1a Algorithm Implementation
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/FNV/Feature Bouncer
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/feature-bouncer/Allegro Map Editor
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/Allegro-map-editor/TypeScript Duckling
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/ts-duckling/Combine Parser Combinator
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/combine/dHash Algorithm Implementation
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/dhash/Allegro Particle Editor
https://github.com/ClaudiuCeia/Allegro-particle-editor/Crypto Analytics Dashboard
AI Over-the-phone Voice Assistant
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React, REST APIs, OpenAI API, Google APIs, jQuery, Social Media APIs, Turf.js, Google Geocoding API, OpenStreetMap API, Vue 2, Sage, D3.js, Mapbox API, Mapbox GL, Google Analytics API, Auth0 API, GitHub API, Salesforce API, Facebook API, Facebook SDK, Facebook Login, X (formerly Twitter) API, YouTube API, AWS Amplify, Vue, Google Maps, Stripe, Telegram Bot API, Slack API, Twilio API
Tools
Phabricator, Microsoft Excel, Front-end Build Tools, ChatGPT, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon CloudWatch, Flow, Git, GitLab, Google Analytics, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), GitLab CI/CD, Roots, GIS, Expo, NPM, Vim Text Editor, Docker Compose, Amazon Cognito, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), NGINX, GitHub, Auth0, Create React App, Prisma, Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), XHProf, PhpMyAdmin, Apache, Google Sheets, Figma, Google Docs, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Whisper
Languages
TypeScript, GraphQL, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, PHP 7, HTML, Hack Language, SQL, Reason ML, Bash, C++, RDF, SPARQL, Python, C
Frameworks
Next.js, Material UI, Redux, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), OAuth 2, Bootstrap, Deck.gl, Express.js, Jest, React Native, Ionic, Tailwind CSS, Bedrock, Ionic 4, CakePHP, PhoneGap
Paradigms
Responsive, Refactoring, Unit Testing, REST, Cross-platform, Microservices, Management, App Development, Mobile Development, Code Refactoring
Platforms
LAMP, Vercel, Docker, WordPress, Mapbox, Algolia, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Firebase, Linux, AWS Lambda, Heroku, Fedora, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), DigitalOcean, Microsoft Edge, Mobile, iOS, Android, Amazon EC2
Storage
MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, Databases, Redis Cache, JSON/XML Schemas, Amazon DynamoDB, MariaDB, Memcached
Industry Expertise
Project Management, Web Design
Other
Code Review, APIs, Web Development, Full-stack, Architecture, Software Architecture, Front-end Development, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Software Design, Startups, Web & Mobile Applications, Webhooks, Front-end, UI Components, RESTful Web Services, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, ChatGPT API, ChatGPT Prompts, Large Language Models (LLMs), Amazon RDS, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, ECS, Deno Fresh, OpenAI, OpenAI GPT-4 API, Amazon Neptune, Deno, Visualization, CI/CD Pipelines, Integration Testing, Apollo Server, SaaS, SaaS Design, API Integration, Back-end, Scripting, Algorithms, System Architecture Design, Project Planning, Leadership, Payment APIs, WordPress Plugins, User Experience (UX), Technical Leadership, Storybook, Release Management, Data Visualization, Light LLMs, Open-source LLMs, Organization, Apollo, Data Processing, HHVM, Neptune, OpenStreetMap, Code Generators, Redis Clusters, RDFs, Mapbox Styling, Mapbox Datasets, Private NPM Modules, Open Source, LogRocket, Cordova, App Store, Google Play Store, Hackathons, Mentorship, i18n, Plugins, Interviews, Outsourcing, IT Outsourcing, HTML Email, Requirements & Specifications, Mentorship & Coaching, Fintech, Dashboards, Cloud, Real-time Data, Mobile Apps, Gaming, User Interface (UI), Text to Speech (TTS), Speech to Text AI, Operations, Crypto, Backtesting Trading Strategies, WebSockets, Remote Team Leadership, Team Leadership, Migration, Groq, Deepgram, Speechmatics, Speech to Text, ElevenLabs Solutions, PlayHT
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