alex lazar_
I'm a product-focused engineer with 7 years of experience building web-based products for early-stage startups. A few things about me:
I've been in early-stage startups for my whole career and I still love this game.
Mainly because I enjoy building, scoping, and designing systems from the ground up while also reasoning about the hard (technical and non-technical) trade-offs that these companies deal with.
Partly because I've learned to manage the risks that come with working in such companies.
Across these many years I've built trading platforms, agentic & ETL pipelines, and various web3 dApps and systems. I've contributed as a lead, developer, and auditor in small (3-30 person) companies.
Lately, (2025/2026) I've been making a hard pivot towards AI/LLM-powered products.
Some of the things I've worked on moved real money and data: $300k/week in volume, thousands of events per second.
Over time, I've learned where rigor pays off and where it just slows you down. A dApp that's supposed to handle $100M+ in TVL earns the need for exhaustive proof of it working securely and as intended (in spirit and letter).
A new product hypothesis, on the other hand, still needs to be reliable, but it also needs to hit the market and prove it's the right thing to build in the first place.
I care less about artisanal code than about matching the engineering to what the business actually needs.
And "well-made" software is as much about the product as the code: the features you pick, the onboarding, the small polish (local-first speed, keyboard-first UX) that makes software a joy to use. That whole arc, from idea to shipped product, is the part I enjoy most.
I only work remote, and I've never really worked any other way.
I'm based in Eastern Europe, but I've spent my whole career working with people who aren't. Clients and colleagues scattered across the US and Western Europe (and a few odder corners like Australia and Thailand), every timezone combination you can think of.
I work Western European hours by default, and I'm used to stretching into US East Coast / Texas time. They tend to wake up around my 4 or 5pm, so we still get a solid few hours of real overlap, and I'm happy to take the occasional 6 or 7pm call to make it work (occasional, not a standing daily thing).
West coast is doable too, honestly, but it works best when you're willing to meet me partway, lean async, maybe start your morning a touch earlier.
It's worth saying: I'm not big on meetings, definitely not big on scheduled, recurring, daily ones. I'd rather be reachable on Slack for a good block of the day and just get the work done. If your team works that way, I think we'd make a good match.
A few more things to mention
I'm at my strongest in TypeScript (React, Node.js), but have also shipped Rust, Go, Python, and Solidity in production.
Outside of work I'm an ex-amateur boxer (still train, but don't compete anymore), a bit of a data science hobbyist, a father (twice) and a husband.
I also like to build software as a hobby:
Job Finder: agentic pipeline that crawls job boards and filters results through a two-stage LLM evaluation.
Minerva: self-hosted API that turns S3 documents into a searchable RAG knowledge base.
CPI Vulnerability Research: security writeup on a class of CPI vulnerabilities in Solana programs, picked up by 0xMacro's Awesome Solana Security list (450+ stars).
In closing
If you're a CTO or technical founder at a funded startup and need someone who can own a piece of your product and ship without hand-holding (full-time or contract), get in touch: alex@leetsoftware.com.
And, if you want to see more of me, I also write a newsletter, make videos on YouTube and gave conference talks at ETH Amsterdam and Chainlink's SmartCon:
← read the newsletter