Andrei Popovici

My story starts long before any job. I first met programming in fifth grade, at my school's informatics club, four years of QBASIC that quietly turned curiosity into a habit. By high school it had a public side: one of my first real applications, written in Visual Basic, was a small tool that calculated the cost of a dial-up internet session. I wrote to a Romanian computer magazine about it, and they featured it in an article and bundled the app on that issue's cover CD. At the time I didn't think much of it. Only later did I realise what a milestone that was for a high-schooler: building something genuinely useful and putting it out into the world.

My professional career began in 2008, close to the metal. I spent six years at Comodo on Windows systems and cryptography, starting deep in the kernel: implementing encryption inside a disk-filter driver and writing a boot-loader recovery tool for critical encryption failures. The GUI-to-driver communication API I designed was the bridge out of the kernel, the channel that let the user-facing application drive the encryption engine. From there I worked up into the application itself, building a plugin architecture and a MySQL data layer for metrics and statistics. Those years taught me how computers really work at the lowest level, the way most engineers never get to see.

From there I moved into systems where reliability is non-negotiable. As Technical Lead and Software Architect at Continental, I owned the design, risk analysis, and delivery of a stack of components that turned raw signals from the car's CAN bus into data the infotainment apps could use: the weather, radio, and multimedia screens drivers actually see. The work ran the full vertical, from the kernel boundary up to the application layer, on one piece of a large automotive infotainment platform.

I then carried that low-level, cross-platform craft into media and desktop. At TiVo, the company behind the DVR, I worked on middleware and playback stability and served as a Scrum Master for the first time. That was the last of my product-company chapters.

In 2019 I joined Endava, the software consultancy that would be my base for the next six years. I started on the desktop, building modern C++17 and Swift applications for Cisco, where I made my first move into people leadership by line-managing a newly formed team. In parallel I founded the C++ community and internship programme at Endava Iași, because growing engineers is part of the job.

Around 2022, still at Endava, I made a deliberate pivot into modern cloud-native backend engineering, and all that breadth turned out to be a superpower. The work carried on across demanding domains: authentication and fintech flows at OneBanx, insurance data aggregation at QBE, decomposing a monolith into NestJS microservices for the London Stock Exchange Group, and contributing directly to the AWS SDK for JavaScript as part of the DynamoDB peer group. After Endava, I led a Qualified Electronic Signature integration at BearingPoint for a digital signing product, owning it end-to-end.

Today I work as a backend consultant at Tranzy.ai, designing services for a next-generation urban mobility platform, with AI-augmented development as a core part of my workflow, using Claude for architecture reasoning, code generation, and review while holding a high quality bar. The throughline of my whole career stays the same: depth from the kernel to the cloud, a habit of owning problems end-to-end, and a genuine pull toward the next hard technical challenge.