Dorin Belascu
Senior Product Engineer
9+ years, high ownership across scale and early-stage products
Senior Product Engineer with 9+ years across React, Next.js, and TypeScript. I started in embedded C at Marelli, shipping firmware to millions of production vehicles, which grounded me in reliability, clean architecture, and why maintainability matters.
At Grubhub I take full ownership of features end-to-end on a 1M+ user platform: ambiguous requirements, unreliable data, brittle APIs and all. I use Claude and AI-driven development daily to move fast without cutting corners, and I cofound products on the side with full-stack ownership from idea to production using AI-agent architectures like BMAD.
I own what I build, push back when something won't scale, and ship things that actually work.
Now
What I'm doing right now
Active employment
Senior Software Engineer (Contract)
Since Apr 2024
- •Auto-trial subscriptions
- •Personalised offers carousel
- •Braze SDK major-version migration
- •Login with Amazon migration
Side projects
Personal projects
Self-directed
Since 2025
- •reinvent — career-change marketplace
- •This site
Self-development
Currently focused on:
- →Learning to become an AI engineer, with Claude as my guide
Work
What I've built, and with what
Every technology below is a filter. Pick one to see the projects it was used on and the problem it solved on each.
Languages
Frameworks & Libraries
Tools & Platforms
Practices
Setting
Senior Software Engineer (Contract)
Apr 2024 – Present
Auto-trial subscriptions
Built the auto-trial subscription feature end to end on a 1M+ user platform — eligibility, enrolment, and the trial-to-paid transition.
- •20,000+ sign-ups at a ~75% conversion rate.
- •~$200k in monthly recurring revenue.
- TypeScript
- Kept an eligibility-and-enrolment flow safe to change in a large codebase where the data feeding it was often unreliable.
- React.js
- Composed the trial flow from the components the rest of the app already used, so an entirely new purchase path did not arrive looking like a separate product.
- Redux
- Kept subscription state predictable across a flow spanning several screens and a payment step.
- TestCafe
- End-to-end cover on the purchase path, because a broken subscription flow is invisible to unit tests and expensive in production.
- React Testing Library
- Covered the eligibility branches at component level, where the combinations are cheap to enumerate.
Personalised offers carousel
Led the full redesign of the carousel surfacing price reductions based on a user's own activity.
- •Tens of thousands of impressions per day.
Braze SDK major-version migration
Migrated the Braze SDK across a breaking major version on the consumer app.
- •Zero production incidents.
- Braze
- Upgrade the messaging SDK across a breaking major version without dropping campaign delivery.
- Datadog
- Made the migration safe to ship incrementally — dashboards and monitors proved each rollout stage healthy before the next one opened.
- Progressive Rollout
- Turned an all-or-nothing SDK upgrade into a staged rollout that could be halted at any point.
Login with Amazon migration
Owned the cross-platform Login with Amazon migration end to end across web, iOS, and Android.
- •Shipped on all three platforms with no break in sign-in.
Cofounder & CTO
Mar 2025 – Present
Meal-delivery platform
Built the product from scratch — storefront, ordering, payments, and the tooling the kitchen runs on.
- •~1,000 orders and 115 users in the first year.
- •Scaled to ~30 daily orders through continuous UX iteration.
- Next.js
- One framework for a storefront that had to be fast on mobile and indexable, with the ordering logic server-side in the same codebase.
- Node.js
- Payments, webhooks, and analytics wired up server-side from day one rather than bolted on later.
- Stripe
- Take card payments and handle repeat orders without building and securing a payment stack.
- Sentry
- Catch checkout errors in production before a customer had to report them.
- AI-Assisted Development
- Shipped a production product end to end with a 3-person team, using a BMAD agent architecture.
Owner, end-to-end IT solution
2025 – Present
Storefront on Shopify
Sole owner of the end-to-end IT solution — a Next.js storefront in front of Shopify.
- •Running as the live storefront.
- Shopify
- Kept catalogue, checkout, and payments on a platform the business can run without me, while owning the storefront experience in Next.js.
Personal projects
Self-directed
2025 – Present
A full-stack side project connecting career-changers with people already working in the field they want to move into. Built to learn Java, Spring, and the Vue ecosystem at depth rather than reach for familiar tools.
- •Modular monolith with a REST API, JPA persistence, security, and versioned migrations.
- Java
- Picked deliberately rather than reaching for Node: the backend roles worth targeting are on the JVM, and reading about a language is not the same as shipping in it.
- Spring Boot
- One opinionated backend stack covering the API, security, persistence, and migrations, so the learning went into architecture rather than wiring.
- PostgreSQL
- Relational from the start — the marketplace's core is people, fields, and bookings, which is all joins and nothing document-shaped.
- Flyway
- Versioned the schema from the first commit, so no migration was ever run by hand.
- Docker
- Ran Postgres locally via Docker Compose so the development database matched the production shape.
- Nuxt 4
- Deliberately learned a second frontend ecosystem properly — file-based routing, server composables, and TypeScript throughout — instead of defaulting to React.
- Modular Monolith
- Spring Modulith enforces module boundaries at build time, so services can be extracted later without a big-bang rewrite.
The site you are reading, with an Assistant that matches job descriptions against this CV and answers questions about my experience — built spec-first, with the domain model and decisions written before any code.
- •Domain model in CONTEXT.md and decisions in docs/adr/ precede the implementation.
- •Job descriptions are matched requirement by requirement, citing real Projects and showing gaps honestly.
- Zod
- One schema both constrains the model's Job Match output and validates it before anything renders.
- Vitest
- Integrity tests keep the single data spine honest, and the Assistant is tested end to end with fakes, so the suite never spends API credit.
- Claude Code
- Drove architecture and implementation from a written domain model, so every decision was recorded and reviewable before code existed.
- Claude API
- Answers only from authored CV data; every cited Project is checked against the real data before it renders.
- Upstash Redis
- One store for per-IP rate limiting and an anonymous log of questions the Assistant couldn't answer.
- AI Integration
- Fails safely: hard spend cap, a kill switch, and a fallback that sends visitors back to the page.
Cofounder
Jan 2025 – 2026
Churn-reduction SaaS
Co-built a product that connects product feedback to revenue data, so churn signals arrive with a value attached.
- •Taken from idea to production by a 3-person team.
- Stripe
- Joined qualitative feedback to real subscription revenue, so churn risk could be ranked by the money behind it.
React Developer
Apr 2021 – Mar 2024
Platform rewrite after a product pivot
Led a full rewrite of the platform when the product pivoted, and grew the team to deliver it.
- •Active enterprise clients grew from 3 to 10.
- •~$50k in additional monthly revenue.
- React.js
- Rebuilt the platform as composable components, so the next product change would not require another rewrite.
- JavaScript
- The platform was plain JavaScript; the rewrite moved it to TypeScript file by file rather than stopping delivery to convert it first.
- Team Leadership
- Doubled the engineering team from 2 to 4 by running the hiring interviews and onboarding, because the rewrite could not land with two people.
District-heating network features
Built the map-heavy features end to end for an AI-powered district-heating platform sold to energy companies across Europe.
- •Network routing, area selection, heat-demand calculation, and ROI screens.
- Mapbox
- Let energy planners draw and route heat networks over real geography, with demand and return on investment computed from what they drew.
Marelli
Software Project Manager
Sep 2020 – Apr 2021
Automotive software project delivery
Owned an automotive software project end to end, synchronising development, QA, and senior management.
- •Chosen for the role specifically to bring technical context into project decisions.
- Project Management
- Kept a multi-team automotive delivery on a fixed customer date, tracked through Gantt planning, without losing the engineering detail behind each decision.
Marelli
Lead Application Developer
Feb 2020 – Aug 2020
Core headlamp rendering module
Led the module responsible for all light output and the innovative lighting features of the headlamp system.
- •Led a team of 6 developers.
- •Shipped to production vehicles — the system reached millions of units on the road.
- Embedded C
- Rendered light output in firmware under real-time and safety constraints, where a defect ships inside a car and cannot be patched remotely.
Marelli
Junior Software Developer
Aug 2018 – Feb 2020
Headlamp module features
Feature work on the headlamp module in an agile team, taking partial ownership of planning and customer discussions.
- •Mentored a junior team member.
- •Progressed to lead developer within 18 months.
Embedded Software Developer (Part-time)
Apr 2017 – Aug 2018
Portable measurement meter firmware
Firmware for portable chemical measurement meters — sensor reading, calibration logic, display, and communication protocols.
- •Shipped as commercially sold products, including the HI98703 turbidity meter, available worldwide.
- Embedded C
- Turned raw sensor readings into calibrated measurements a lab could trust, on a battery-powered device with only a few kilobytes to work in.
Education
Where I studied
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
Computer and Information Sciences, General
2015 – 2019
Contact
Get in touch
Open to senior engineering roles. Best way to reach me is by email.