I have arrived to London about 6 years ago and now, I will soon be a citizen, that is … if I pass the “Life in the UK” exam.

I came over with a lot of experience from Romania to a country where I had to start from scratch and got a support role initially. Luckily this evolved to be a Head of Engineering position with Ultraspeed - a managed hosting company. I dealt with architecture decisions and pre and post-sales with some major clients like View London or the British Heart Foundation.

In the meantime, Ultraspeed has been acquired by the 6dg Group. I achieved a lot of things that I am proud of at Ultraspeed, but time had come and I moved to a company that this year had a whooping £1.5 billion IPO. That company is Just-eat.

I held multiple roles there creating an operations department and hiring a team who dealt with the live environments. I created test environments for the first time and setup multi office VPN networks between all international offices. When I joined the tech team had six programmers, one tester and the CTO. The company was dealing with a few thousand orders a day. When I moved on, I left behind a team of 50 developers, a DevOps team of 5 and a support team of about 10 people spread around the world. Servers were buzzing nicely handling 50K orders a day world-wide. Just-eat is now present in 13 countries and still growing.

But time had came again and after 18 months of Just-Eat I decided to give the fashion industry a go. First, I started with a contract at Kurt Geiger (an established corporation with many brands and worldwide presence, just acquired by the Jones Group) right in time to build the infrastructure for the new website relaunch.

Then I went for something more challenging and decided to try the startup scene. After all London has a booming startup movement and in 2011 it was just warming up.

I met with a lot of startups at the time, but I could only see myself working for Shopcade - a social-shopping/fashion-magazine targeting young audiences.

Since then I stayed in the fashion/e-commerce industry as their deputy CTO. I joined them when they had 1000 users and I built everything with them up to the point of 1.1 million users at the time of this writing, from the VPC instances to the developers interviews, from negotiating for servers and fibre optics connections to personally programming analytics engines, bank like accounts and continuous deployment scripts written from scratch.

However, as the title states … the time has come…

… to look for new opportunities, ventures and adventures. I want bigger challenges, bigger responsibilities, bigger teams to manage and bigger projects to plan. I am looking for that sweet opportunity where I can work with great minds and remarkable people, people who share my vision and whose vision I share.

In the meantime I am nurturing a project of my own. I will talk about it soon. I expect a beta to be up next month, so I will link to it. Maybe some of you will even use it, but no spoilers :)