
Victor Blaga
Software Developer
Victor is a versatile software engineer with more than 12 years of professional experience, specializing in full-stack web development, cloud platforms, and information systems. He is fluent in most major languages (JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and Ruby) and related frameworks. Victor continuously strives to improve his craft by studying new methods and technologies. For example, Victor thinks that Clojure is the best, most under-appreciated programming language out there.
Portfolio
Experience
Agile Software Development - 12 yearsJava - 6 yearsPython - 6 yearsC#.NET - 5 yearsData Engineering - 5 yearsTechnical Leadership - 3 yearsMachine Learning - 2 yearsAvailability
Preferred Environment
Slack, Git, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), JetBrains, Linux
The most amazing...
...thing I've built is an end-to-end review analysis system for the hotel review platform Trivago, powered by NLP and machine learning.
Work Experience
Tech Lead
Fortune 100 Construction and Farm Machinery Maker (via Toptal)
- Developed a rule engine for high-throughput streaming status messages that performs data quality validation according to predefined business rules.
- Extended technical and architectural support to the project manager and various other business stakeholders.
- Provided mentorship and technical assistance to a team of four developers and pushed for and ensured high standards for code quality and software development practices.
Freelance Senior Developer (Java, C#, and OpenShift)
BMW
- Implemented an automated goods-receipt process that checks the validity of the documents presented by a truck driver upon entering the premises of a BMW plant, reducing the previous manual process effort to almost zero.
- Developed several of the connected supply chain apps used by the BMW material planning and logistics department to track the status of parts deliveries, increasing the employee's efficiency in tracking and managing the delivery process.
- Improved the efficiency and cost of the BMW live delivery tracking solution. For example, reduced the database costs from $4,000 per month to $300 per month.
- Developed a Java-based orchestrator service coordinating communication with various external services within the quality assurance/reclamation department, providing adapters for HTTP/REST, Apache Kafka, and SAP RFC.
Senior Developer
Scalable Capital
- Contributed to various features related to Scalable Capital's back-end Java-based API and its React/Redux front-end application.
- Migrated a batch job solution from Spring Batch to AWS CloudWatch Events which increased the efficiency of these jobs and reduced the complexity related to locking and synchronization.
- Proposed and prototyped an Apache Kafka-based alternative solution for storing financial transaction data.
Tech Lead Search Engineering | Lead Engineer Review Analysis
Trivago GmbH
- Developed a hotel review scraping solution that extracted reviews from more than ten review websites and for 500,000+ hotels while also aggregating and storing a total of 10 million+ reviews.
- Designed and developed a machine learning experimentation and integration platform used by the data science team to test and fine-tune hundreds of review analysis machine learning model variants each day.
- Implemented a review labeling web application used by linguists to generate more than 10,000+ data points used for training machine learning algorithms.
- Developed an automated and auto-scalable solution able to perform ML-based review classification on the entire 10 million+ hotel review dataset in a couple of hours.
- Implemented and maintained a search index solution serving 100+ million of daily search queries.
- Developed a novel phrase search query index capable of handling 10,000+ complex/rich natural language daily search queries, such as "hotels with a great pool in Milano."
Senior Full-stack Developer | Data Scientist
Reputami GmbH
- Implemented Ruby-based web scrapers for eight hotel review websites, aggregating 10,000+ reviews for 100+ customers.
- Implemented the main Reputami website: a Ruby on Rails website generating HTML on the server that was used by more than 100 paying customers.
- Designed, tested, and implemented machine learning algorithms to analyze and extract categorical and polarity classifications from more than 10,000 hotel reviews.
Experience
Data Quality Rule Engine
Because of sound architectural decisions and solid development practices, the project was a great success and the client was very happy with our team's performance.
End-to-end Hotel Review Analysis Pipeline for Trivago
The goal was to extract topic-based scores from the textual reviews and aggregate them into a global hotel category score, e.g., a review such as "the hotel was close to the city center" would score "good" on the "location" topic and would contribute positively to the global hotel location score.
I was the lead engineer, responsible for implementing the scrapers, the analysis modules, and the infrastructure components around them. I also had to coordinate with various project stakeholders and contributors, including data scientists - to integrate the ML models and with product owners - to calibrate scoring aggregation methods.
I also designed and developed a couple of tools around the main project: an experimentation tool used by data scientists to iterate and fine-tune models and a classification tool used by language experts to generate training data.
Goods Receipt Automated Process for BMW, Munich
I coordinated with business stakeholders to refine and implement business requirements and with SAP specialists to define data selection processes. I was the primary (and only) developer on this project.
The Reputami.com Website
https://web.archive.org/web/20150314230322/http://reputami.com/enAdditionally, I build web scrapers capable of retrieving social media reviews for various hotel and restaurant websites as well as a machine learning-based natural language processing module capable of analyzing textual reviews and deriving categorical scores.
Skills
Languages
Java, C#.NET, Python, SQL, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Snowflake
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Data Science, Azure DevOps, REST
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), Flask, Spring Boot, Redux
Libraries/APIs
React, Apache Lucene, jQuery, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), Keras, Scikit-learn, Nokogiri
Tools
Apache Solr, JetBrains, Git, Slack, OpenUI5, Solr
Platforms
OpenShift, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Jakarta EE, Azure, AWS Lambda, Docker, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Other
Natural Language Processing (NLP), Software Architecture, Data Engineering, Technical Leadership, GPT, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Machine Learning, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Kinesis, Machine Language
Storage
Elasticsearch, Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
University of Bonn - Bonn, Germany
Bachelor's Degree in Automatic Systems
University of Transylvania - Brasov, Romania