Senior engineer. Full ownership.
I build software products for startups and scaling teams, backend systems, APIs, platforms, and the architecture that holds it all together.
George Bidilica · Bucharest, Romania · UTC+2
What I Do
Product Engineering
Zero to production. I take your product from architecture to deployed software, APIs, data systems, backend logic, and enough frontend to ship.
System Modernisation
Monolith to microservices. VMs to managed cloud. Legacy PHP to domain-oriented Node.js services. I've done these migrations in production, near-zero downtime, without the rewrite-from-scratch gamble.
Fractional / Embedded Engineering
For product teams that need a senior engineer in their workflow, not a contractor who needs managing, but a peer who takes ownership. Architecture decisions, code, shipping, and raising the bar.
Selected Work
Self-Serve Advertising Platform
Took a self-serve ad platform from MVP to scaled production, multi-channel campaigns across Programmatic, Search, and YouTube. Migrated the backend from a PHP monolith to domain-oriented NestJS microservices, built serverless data pipelines, and led the infrastructure move to GCP. Go-to engineer and technical owner for 3+ years.
Used-Car Marketplace Backend
Backend for a used-car marketplace, 500K+ listings over three years. Built to run with minimal attention.
Enterprise Retail Platform
Orders, suppliers, backorders, payments for a large retailer. Admin dashboards and reporting tools for day-to-day operations.
How I Think
A decade of owning production systems taught me that most engineering problems are judgment problems. I have strong opinions and I know which decisions matter now and which can wait. When the context changes, so do I. I co-author with Claude daily, then fix the parts it's confidently wrong about.
I work best with founders and product leads who know what they want to build but need a senior engineer to figure out how. I don't need managing. I need context.
Working Together
I take on a small number of engagements at a time. For product builds and ongoing platform work, I typically work through Oxentree, my product engineering studio. For direct work, fractional engineering, architecture consulting, or embedded team roles, we work together directly.
Tell me about your product. What are you building, where are you stuck, and what does "done" look like?