Vlad Balea - Software Developer

Technical Skills

JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL

React.js, Next.js, TanStack Start, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Localisation

Node.js, Express.js, REST APIs, OpenAPI / Swagger

PostgreSQL, PostGIS, MySQL

Crawlee, Cheerio, Selenium, Regex, NLP, Web Scraping

Linux, Nginx, AWS, Docker, Git

Node.js, TypeScript, TanStack Start, Express.js, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Crawlee, Nginx

Founded and independently built a real estate data platform end-to-end, owning architecture, development, and infrastructure with full technical autonomy as sole engineer.
Data Pipeline: Architected a high-throughput scraping microservice using Crawlee and Cheerio to continuously aggregate and standardize real estate listings from fragmented portals.
NLP Extraction Engine: Developed a custom zero-cost Regex/NLP pipeline to parse unstructured, 500+ word listing descriptions, extracting precise street numbers and mapping them to PostGIS coordinates.
Full-Stack & Infrastructure: Built a server-side rendered frontend (TanStack Start) and REST API (Express.js), independently deploying and maintaining the entire architecture on a bare-metal Linux VPS with Nginx.

Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Docker, Linux

Full-Lifecycle Ownership: Sole engineer on an extensive, feature-rich SA-MP gamemode, live in production and under continuous active development due to its scope; architected, built, and independently maintain and extend the entire system with no other engineers involved.
Server Architecture: Engineered the core backend, gameplay systems, and event-driven real-time state synchronization from scratch in Node.js/TypeScript, independently making all technical and design decisions across an expanding set of interdependent game mechanics.
Data Persistence: Designed and integrated a PostgreSQL database layer managing in-game economies, persistent user progression, and real-time state recovery.
Library Development: Prior to this project, designed and open-sourced Open Godfather, a fully-typed Node.js/TypeScript library wrapping the samp-node plugin in an object-oriented API, built specifically to support the scale of this gamemode.

Node.js, TypeScript, Pawn Language, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Linux

Developed and maintained custom server-side scripts, gameplay mechanics, and real-time event loops on a project basis for multiple active multiplayer communities, ensuring high performance and low latency across varying architectures.
Optimized relational database queries (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and rapidly resolved synchronization bugs based on direct client feedback.

Next.js, Express.js, FastAPI, AWS EC2, Stable Diffusion

Microservice Architecture: Built a full-stack generative AI image-generation platform with a Next.js frontend, an Express.js API layer, and a dedicated Python (FastAPI) microservice for ML inference, integrated via REST APIs.
Cloud AI Deployment: Provisioned and configured a GPU-backed AWS EC2 instance to self-host Stable Diffusion XL with custom checkpoints and LoRAs and serving concurrent, high-compute image-generation requests.

TypeScript, Node.js, Rollup

Library Development: Authored and open-sourced a fully-typed Node.js/TypeScript library that abstracts the low-level samp-node plugin API into an object-oriented, event-driven interface for building open.mp server scripts and gamemodes.
Developer Tooling: Engineered create-og-app, a CLI project starter that automatically provisions server files, plugins, and Rollup bundler configuration, reducing new-project setup friction.

BSc in Psychology