Vlad Babii

Led product development across executives, partners and engineering teams while driving the full product lifecycle and building the internal AI framework used by the organization.

• Technical advisor and product owner in meetings with 40+ security-industry partners: met central monitoring station companies' engineering and leadership, mapped their APIs, communication and heartbeats, and turned that into terms the CEO could contract on.
• Drove the full product lifecycle from discovery and requirements through PRDs, stakeholder review, development, QA, release and follow-up, managing a portfolio of 500+ concurrent initiatives.
• Turned large projects (6,000+ Jira tickets, code and QA reports) into AI-built status reports for the CEO and board: what is done, what lands next week, what is behind, with a diff against last week's report and decisions framed as yes/no or a few options.
• Created PRDs with interactive HTML simulations; introduced AI-assisted PRD review and role-based sign-off for executive, product, cloud, firmware and QA approvers.
• Product owner and gate approver on hardware and software initiatives in a stage-gated process: new hubs, a connectivity module and a thermostat, AI video analytics, a training academy, e-commerce.
• Produced implementation-ready cloud specifications covering push-notification migration, a public REST API, emergency-contact data, monitoring-station heartbeats, partner SSO and an ML/VLM camera-analysis pipeline.
• Built the internal AI engineering framework with 70+ modules, including 200+ MCP APIs behind a unified gateway, search across 150,000+ documents, a knowledge base with 500+ AI tips, and 200+ workflows powered by a self-learning system.

Stack: MCP, LLM agents, PRDs, Jira, Confluence, Node.js, Python

Technical architecture and cross-team coordination for the company's next-generation IoT platform, working across cloud, firmware, mobile and web while introducing the new platform alongside the existing MiOS / Vera ecosystem.

• Coordinated technical decisions across cloud, firmware, mobile and web teams, keeping the different parts of the platform interoperable.
• Designed the new platform to coexist with the legacy MiOS / Vera platform, allowing both systems to operate together during the transition.
• Set the platform foundations: one service per repository, the API call format, service-to-service messaging, permissions and roles, events and notifications.
• Designed and evolved major platform components including the automation engine, devices and capabilities, storage, video ML, monitoring signals, policies, SSO/JWT, billing and partner integrations.
• Data-platform evolution: Cassandra, then Postgres/CockroachDB wrappers and migrations, distributed locks, change data capture.
• R&D: MQTT-based service discovery, multi-datacentre Cassandra on Docker Swarm, framework benchmarks.
• 2024–2025: returned to hands-on Node.js development and code review on the cloud monorepo; AI-generated documentation for the whole estate and a per-service test framework.

Stack: Node.js, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQTT, Cassandra, CockroachDB, Docker, Kubernetes, Deno, OpenTelemetry

Independent architecture and engineering work combining AI integration, distributed infrastructure and custom business applications.

• Integrated AI with billing, financial and inventory data sources to produce reports in minutes instead of days.
• Designed distributed backup storage using ZFS, a tinc mesh VPN and ZFS replication, maintaining secondary copies across multiple locations.
• Built custom web applications and AI harnesses for reporting, monitoring and alerting.
• Designed high-availability, secure APIs on Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes container stacks.
• Advised on secure embedded devices and their integration with cloud services.
• Wired automatic code-fix tools into CI for several clients: fixes land on their own branch, a second build runs the same tests, and the branch merges only if the results match.
• Built a real-device test robot for a client: a camera and a stylus on an XYZ rig tap, swipe and photograph phones and tablets; delivered the prototype, software and manual, and about 50 units were built.
• Manage Google Workspace for a couple of clients.

Stack: AI / LLM, OpenTelemetry, PHP, Go, Node.js, Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZFS, tinc, Docker, Kubernetes, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL

Integration of third-party technologies and partner services into the GoDaddy platform.

• Integrated third-party technologies and partner services into the GoDaddy platform.
• Designed and implemented technical solutions for new integrations and product features.
• Worked across PHP, Python and LaTeX as required by the integrations and supporting systems.
• Reviewed technical solutions used by the team and improved development tooling and workflows.

Stack: PHP, Python, JavaScript, LaTeX, PostgreSQL

Technical and team leadership for the web platform of the MiOS / Vera home-automation system.

• Led a team of 4 from analysis through delivery, rotating responsibilities so everyone understood the full codebase.
• Led the migration of the web stack from PHP 5.2 to PHP 7.0.
• Designed a business-oriented white-label framework allowing all OEM deployments to share a single code repository.
• Designed and built the Amazon Alexa integration end to end: skills working with the company's app, account linking with SSO and tokens.
• Drove adoption of MQTT over WebSockets to replace long polling and initiated a centralized logging platform for the web stack.
• Automated hardware and software testing using microcontroller-driven devices exposing HTTP and TCP APIs.
• Turned deep dives into bugs, features and reports into simple decisions for management: drop the feature or not, is the bug fixed, where the process broke.

Stack: PHP, Node.js, MQTT, WebSockets, MySQL

Provided architecture, issue analysis and rapid prototyping across multiple projects.

• Built a PHP API aggregator that reduced a slow mobile application's many upstream calls to a single request, with parallel upstream requests and streamed newline-delimited JSON.
• Designed a highly available and redundant job-queue system for a large B2B e-commerce platform using RabbitMQ, PHP, Node.js and MySQL.
• Built a real-time syslog-ng log analyser publishing into an MQTT cluster for processing and alerting.
• Designed a clustered Node.js MQTT broker with shared state and custom handling of network splits and rejoins.
• Implemented multi-master data synchronization over high-latency links using CouchDB replication and automatic conflict resolution.

Stack: PHP, Node.js, RabbitMQ, MQTT, CouchDB, MySQL

Web platform development for the MiOS / Vera home-automation system.

• Contributed to the migration of the web stack from PHP 4 to PHP 5.2.
• Developed and evolved the web platform supporting the MiOS / Vera ecosystem.
• Worked on white-label architecture supporting multiple OEM deployments from a shared codebase.
• Owned CI/CD and QA scheduling for the web platform.

Stack: PHP, MySQL

Large-scale sensor array system for collecting and monitoring data from 6,000+ analog and digital sensors distributed across a large area.

• Designed the software and network architecture and led prototyping and initial testing.
• Designed MQTT-based sensor data transport with Node.js WebSocket and long-polling endpoints for live monitoring.
• Developed firmware for custom Arduino-compatible boards using ATmega2560 and W5100 Ethernet, optimized for 256 KB of memory and 16 MHz operation.
• Built PHP and jQuery interfaces for alerts and reporting, backed by a MySQL cluster.

Stack: MQTT, Node.js, C (AVR), PHP, MySQL

Web application architecture and e-commerce integrations across multiple PHP frameworks, with payment processing and automated development and deployment environments.

• Architected web applications using Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend, jQuery and MySQL.
• Integrated Google Wallet, PayPal and bank payment gateways into e-commerce platforms.
• Set up production, test and local development environments.
• Implemented automated testing triggered on every commit.

Stack: PHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, Zend, jQuery, MySQL, Google Wallet, PayPal

Desktop and mobile application with automated testing and deployment.

• Built libraries for automated testing and harnesses to drive them.
• Developed content-scraping and crawling tools with image comparison between the application and its design documents.
• Implemented desktop and mobile user interfaces from design files.
• Developed application functionality using PHP and MySQL.

Stack: PHP, MySQL

PHP-based payment and e-commerce platform supporting payment integrations, customer-specific deployments and multiple branded shops from a shared product.

• Led a team of 6 developing and integrating payment and e-commerce solutions.
• Designed multi-shop architectures that allowed the same product to power multiple branded stores without maintaining separate codebases.
• Worked directly with banks to implement and integrate their direct payment solutions.
• Developed templating and customization systems for white-label deployments.
• Managed Linux and Windows servers and the supporting network infrastructure.

Stack: PHP, JavaScript, E-commerce, Payment gateways, Templating, Linux, Windows

Modernization of DOS-era FoxPro accounting applications into Windows-based systems.

• Led development across FoxPro, Visual Basic and Microsoft Access.
• Analyzed requirements and translated existing accounting workflows into the new applications.
• Planned and carried out migration of existing accounting data.
• Through my own company, won EU-funded projects: wrote the applications, went through the tender evaluation, and delivered part of the IT work.

Stack: FoxPro, Visual Basic, MS Access

Development of Visual Basic 6 database applications tailored to different business workflows, with custom interfaces and integration with barcode scanners and other hardware.

• Developed database management applications with custom interfaces and workflows for different business use cases.
• Designed and implemented application logic and database-driven workflows in Visual Basic 6.
• Integrated barcode scanners and other hardware through serial and USB interfaces.

Stack: Visual Basic 6, Database applications, Serial / USB, Barcode scanners