Senior Software Engineer with 14+ years building and scaling full-stack and data-intensive products. Joined an EdTech platform as the first developer alongside the CTO and helped grow it from tens of thousands of users to millions, and later worked as a hands-on Founding Engineer / CTO on a real-time market-intelligence platform. Hands-on across TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, cloud infrastructure and DevOps, with experience in system design, performance and technical leadership.
Employment CV
Applying for Senior Software Engineer, Senior Full-Stack, Senior Backend, Platform Engineer, hands-on Tech Lead or suitable Staff Engineer roles. Single-column and ATS-friendly.
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Founding Engineer CV
Applying for Founding Engineer, first-engineer, early-stage technical lead or hands-on CTO roles. Same facts as the employment CV, framed around product ownership and building from nothing.
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Consulting capability profile
Sending to consulting prospects, contract engineering leads, or companies evaluating Corco Labs. Leads with problems solved and proof rather than career history.
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Founder & Senior Software Engineer - Independent Consultancy
Corco Labs d.o.o. (previously Corcosoft, Borut Balazek s.p.) · Aug 2012 - Present
Independent software consultancy, 70+ projects across six countries. The long-term engagements below are invoiced through it.
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Delivered 70+ software projects across FinTech, IoT, Energy, EdTech and consumer products.
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Worked on projects for international organisations including Philips, RWE, Innogy, Danone and Les Mills, directly and through partner agencies.
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Owned delivery end to end across requirements, architecture, implementation, deployment and long-term maintenance.
Founding Engineer / CTO - Hands-on Engineering
MarketAlerts.com · May 2024 - Mar 2026
AI investment-intelligence startup - real-time signals across 20+ global markets. Invoiced through Corco Labs d.o.o. Wound down in 2026.
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Helped build an AI-powered market intelligence platform covering more than 20 global markets in real time, spanning web app, mobile app and CMS.
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Designed and built the backend and data platform: 100+ API endpoints across TypeScript and Python/FastAPI, plus containerised ETL tasks run per source as Airflow pods on Kubernetes - SEC filings, news, congressional trades, analyst ratings and insider transactions.
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Built LLM-based classification using hierarchical GPT models to categorize financial signals, and an OpenAI summariser turning raw earnings-call transcripts into structured highlights - powering AI watchlists and investor-facing insights.
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Owned architecture and infrastructure, including the cloud migration from AWS to GCP.
Tech Lead / Backend Architect
Martian & Machine · Aug 2024 - Feb 2025
Government smart-city programme in the Middle East, delivered across five city domains and several vendor teams.
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Designed and built the backend architecture: 20+ microservices on Kubernetes across five city domains, each with its own database and API, using domain-driven design with clean contracts so several vendor teams could build in parallel.
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Built the platform services the city domains ran on - user, onboarding, notification, certification and mail - in NestJS and TypeScript, with APISIX as the API gateway, Keycloak for identity and GitLab CI for delivery.
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Translated specifications handed over by an external consultancy into C4 architecture models, which became the reference the vendor teams built against.
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Designed the event-driven layer connecting IoT gateways to application services - Kafka for event streaming, Cassandra for time-series sensor data, plus PostgreSQL, Grafana and Keycloak.
Senior Software Engineer
Edukey Education Ltd · Nov 2015 - Dec 2023
UK EdTech behind ClassCharts and Provision Map, acquired by TES Global. Eight-year engagement, invoiced through Corco Labs d.o.o.
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Joined as the first developer alongside the CTO and helped grow the platform from a few dozen schools and tens of thousands of users to thousands of schools and millions of users across the UK education system, remaining one of the two most prolific contributors on both of its products, across a team of more than a dozen engineers.
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Modernized the product incrementally: rebuilt the legacy web application from jQuery to React, and migrated the mobile apps from native Android to React Native across both Android and iOS - teacher, student and parent, three apps on both platforms from one codebase.
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Owned the mobile product end to end: the React web application behind the apps, push notifications, offline handling, and the release and signing pipeline for all six store listings.
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Took the infrastructure through three generations as the load grew: Rackspace to GCP to AWS, from three servers to roughly 100 instances.
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Brought Docker into the company in the mid-2010s and containerised both development and production, then prepared and carried the platform onto Kubernetes as it scaled.
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Led the migration of 40+ TB of images and assets between cloud providers, writing the migration tooling, with the platform staying up throughout.
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Introduced a more structured development process - GitFlow, GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines - and improved scalability through SQL query optimisation and other backend work.
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Owned testing and QA across both products: introduced Cypress and the GitHub Actions workflows that ran it, built out unit and integration coverage and the CI deployment pipelines, and mentored the QA engineer who grew the suite out.
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When UK schools closed in March 2020, helped ship homework file submission with virus scanning in under two weeks.
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One of four code owners on the main repository, reviewing work across the codebase: mentored junior developers and onboarded the teams that joined as the company grew and was acquired by TES Global.
Web Developer
Alstar d.o.o. · Jun 2011 - Jan 2013
Slovenian unified-communications provider - VoIP and virtual PBX telephony, hosting and CRM. First role, started as a student job and continued as a contract invoiced through Corco Labs, which was founded for it in Aug 2012.
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Customised vTiger CRM for client businesses, adapting its modules and workflows to match each company's sales and internal processes.
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Built and maintained client websites, mostly on Joomla, plus e-commerce and business integrations - working directly with clients from requirements through deployment and ongoing maintenance.
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Rebuilt and ran the company's own website on Joomla.
- Languages
- TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Rust
- Frontend
- React, Next.js, React Native, Astro, Tailwind
- Backend
- Node.js, Bun, NestJS, Fastify, FastAPI, Symfony, tRPC, GraphQL, REST APIs
- Architecture
- Microservices, Event-driven architecture, Domain-driven design
- Data
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, ClickHouse, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Airflow
- Infrastructure
- Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Azure, GitHub Actions, CI/CD
- AI & LLM
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, LLM classification pipelines
- Testing & Observability
- Jest, Vitest, Cypress, Playwright, Grafana