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Vlad Babii

Product Manager · Software Architect

vlad@babii.ro
linkedin.com/in/vladbabii/
vlad.babii.ro

Summary

I started as a developer and never stopped being one. Over 25 years I went from PHP back ends and payment gateways to sensor networks over MQTT, and then to designing the cloud behind a smart-home and professional-security platform: 900+ microservices handling 10M+ events a day.

Today I lead product: I turn requests from partners, dealers and executives into PRDs with interactive simulations, and into specifications engineering can build from. I like knowing how things work underneath: protocols, queues, firmware, the bytes on the wire.

Experience

Product Manager, Ezlo

2026 – Present

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, including professional monitoring stations.
  • 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.
  • 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

Software Architect, Ezlo

Dec 2018 – 2025

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

Software Architect & AI Integration Consultant, Independent contractor

2018 – Present

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.

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

Developer, GoDaddy

Feb 2018 – Dec 2018

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 & Team Lead, MiOS

2015 – Feb 2018

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.
  • 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.

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

Software Consultant, Analysis and prototyping

2014 – 2017

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

Developer, MiOS

Aug 2013 – 2015

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.

Stack: PHP, MySQL

Technical Lead, Sensor array system design

Nov 2012 – Jun 2013

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

Software Consultant, Web projects

2010 – 2012

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

Developer, Mobidev

2009 – 2010

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

Lead Developer, Exig0

2006 – 2009

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

Tech Lead, Accounting software

2003 – 2006

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.

Stack: FoxPro, Visual Basic, MS Access

Developer, Database applications

2000 – 2003

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

Skills

Languages: JavaScript / Node.js, PHP, Python, Bash, C, Go

Queues & transport: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS, MQTT, WebSockets, REST, JSON-RPC

Data: Cassandra, CockroachDB / PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, InfluxDB, Loki, Memcached

Deploy & ops: Kubernetes, Docker, Podman, Proxmox VM & LXC, OpenTelemetry + Loki + Grafana

AI: MCP servers & gateways, Agent harnesses, Local models, Retrieval & semantic search

Product: PRDs, Interactive simulations, Stage-gated initiatives, Competitive analysis