Alex Lazar
I'm a product-focused engineer with 7 years of experience building web products for early-stage startups. I've architected and contributed to agentic systems, trading platforms, data pipelines, and systems handling up to 8-figure trading volumes and thousands of events per second.
Key achievements
- Built a GDPR-compliant AI platform for founder and executive accountability across KPIs and the business thesis, grounded in PDFs, documents, and slide decks.
- Contributed to systems that reached $300k in first-week volume, $110M in TVL, and 8 figures in cumulative volume.
- Built a trading platform processing thousands of market-data events per second and a blockchain indexer processing 10M+ monthly transactions.
Technical skills
- Programming languages: TypeScript (7 years), Python, Solidity, Rust, Go.
- Backend: Express.js, Fiber, Socket.io, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, AWS, Terraform, Docker, BetterStack, Sentry.
- Frontend: React, Tanstack Query/Router, Next.js, React Router.
- AI/LLM: LangSmith, Vercel SDK, OpenRouter.
Experience
During this period I contracted for various clients contributing across a number of products. Sometimes that meant wearing a lead hat for teams of up to 5, managing roadmaps, making hiring decisions, etc. Other times it meant "only" architect and IC level work. Some of these products include:
- an AI-powered platform (IconicShift) to manage founder and exec accountability across KPIs and the business thesis with context from various sources including PDF, .docs and .pptx files.
- a trading platform that processed thousands of market data points per second from Binance for Paragon.
- an indexer and relayer for XGame (EVM gaming dApp) which achieved $300k volume in its first week
Dextrac is one of the earliest Chainlink node operators.
- Designed, developed and maintained a high availability blockchain indexer to process & store 10M+ monthly Chainlink-related transactions.
- Built a REST API & React dashboard for the ingested data, integrated a payment gateway, and implemented role-based access control for paid-tier users.
- Presented our work at Chainlink's SmartCon in Barcelona.
Toucan was a $110m TVL, $2B vol RWA startup focused on tokenizing carbon credits.
- Built an open-source TypeScript isomorphic SDK to help external devs interact with the protocol.
- Built the frontend for a cross-chain bridge, integrating with smart contracts and backend services.
- Built scripts to copy metadata of & redeploy hundreds of ecosystem ERC20 tokens cross-chain.
- Contributed to various Solidity smart contracts including a cross-chain bridge integration and a swap-and-offset helper.
- Presented our work at conferences like ETH Amsterdam, LFGROW, ETH Denver and internally for companies like Porsche and Volkswagen.
- Freelanced for various digital content creators building automations, dashboards, A/B tests and an edtech platform that reached $1M/yr revenue with 10k+ MAU.
Side projects
- An open-source framework for cloud-based coding agents. Forked it to add new features like message scheduling, queued prompts, TLDraw whiteboarding and fix various reliability and running/leaking cost issues.
- Built an eval-driven job-search pipeline that reads multiple job-board providers and syncs them in a Notion CRM. Cut false positives down to 10%.
- Self-hosted Dockerized API that makes it easy to convert S3 documents into a searchable knowledge base for RAG applications (does smart semantic chunking, reranking, vectorization, is compatible with OpenAI and self-hosted embedding models).
Education
- Mechanical Engineering Degree, University of Craiova, Romania (2018 - 2020). The most impactful class I had was for MATLAB. It convinced me to pursue a career in software.