Summary
Full-Stack Engineer with 8+ years of experience. Regardless of the stack I'm more of a product developer, so I start from what the thing needs to do and who is going to use it. I build web products end to end, from the first product conversation through to something shipped and polished, and I usually reach for the simpler solution before the bigger one. My work has run in production for brands like L'Oréal, the NFL, and some of Europe's best-known fashion labels. When something breaks, I take ownership of it, and I see the last 10% through.
I don't hand-write much code anymore. I direct Claude Code and Cursor, and the useful part is knowing when to throw the output away, so most of my day goes on architecture and review.
Core Skills
Front end: React, Next.js, TypeScript, React Native and Expo, EmberJS, Vite, Redux, Three.js, Tailwind, Storybook, GraphQL and Apollo Client, JavaScript, SCSS, HTML and CSS
Back end: Node.js, Fastify, Ruby on Rails, Java (Spring), Python and FastAPI, Redis and BullMQ, REST APIs, JWT auth, payment integrations
Data: PostgreSQL, Drizzle, Typesense, MySQL, PL/SQL, Supabase, relational schema design
Ways of working: owning features end to end, product and UX judgment, large refactors, performance profiling, A/B testing and feature flags, agile teams and release rotations, code review and mentoring, Playwright end-to-end suites in CI, directing coding agents against a spec
Experience
| Toffee AI · Full-Stack Developer (freelance) | Sep 2025 to Present |
- Built the character-creation feature end to end from just mock designs, so the UX and every edge case underneath it were mine to work out. A searchable tag field debounced and cached over a paginated API, a four-step AI image-generation flow, progress that survives a refresh, moderation and report flows, public/unlisted/private visibility, and a gradual A/B rollout behind Flagsmith. About two months of work.
- Brought the page load down from around three seconds to about one and a half. Part of that was an image pipeline that pre-generates full and medium sizes so the app sends smaller images first; part was cutting a heavy component from roughly 300 re-renders on load to about 10.
- Worked across the stack, including back-end pull requests for character and chat sharing and for chat media generation, plus a public slimmed-down endpoint that won back both SEO and first load.
- Killed a footer bug class that produced a ticket roughly every three days across five pages, where fixing it on one page broke it on another. It sat deep in the DOM and absolutely positioned, so I moved it to a portal with a little per-page classing and the tickets stopped.
- Made release calls (ship or hold) on my own when they were needed, and sat in the beta users' Discord reading feedback directly to find where people were getting stuck.
| SAIZ GmbH · Front-End Team Lead (freelance to full-time) | Sep 2024 to Oct 2025 |
- Led a three-person front-end team, covering technical direction, code review, and the groundwork the rest built on.
- Rebuilt the widget so every brand could run its own version: its own fonts, colors, component choices, number of steps, and placement, all from a single brand config and dropped in with one HTML selector (React, Vite, Redux).
- Taught myself Three.js and Blender to build interactive 3D body avatars, instead of an image-swapping idea that would have been slow and heavy. Later tracked down and fixed a memory leak that was pushing the browser past 2 GB.
- Rebuilt the analytics platform in Next.js with dynamic tables and returns charts, worked out a smoother transition animation with the CEO, and grew the engine into two more products (Size Nudge and Size Chart) plus an AI body-measurement simulator.
| Ritech Solutions · Software Engineer, on Jebbit / BlueConic | May 2021 to Nov 2024 |
- Worked full-stack across three codebases (the platform, the renderer, and the embeddable widget) in EmberJS, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and vanilla JS.
- Owned features from the first product conversation through to release, took my turn on the twice-weekly deploys and on-call, and helped lead a four-month refactor of the styling system from one database row per style override to a single merged schema, kept backwards-compatible and running next to the old one throughout.
- Made questionnaires-by-email work, which the team had written off as impossible, by sending an email-safe first screen that links straight into the hosted version.
| Tetra Solutions · Full-Stack Developer | Jan 2020 to May 2021 |
- Built the whole front end of a national e-invoicing and fiscalization product (React and SCSS, on a Java/Spring and PostgreSQL back end), created for Albania's 2020 invoicing law. It covered the dashboard, invoice creation, and a lot of calculation-heavy screens, and I shaped the discount schema behind it.
- On an event and stadium ticketing product, covering online purchase and printing at physical ticket offices, added JWT auth, payments through a local bank and PayPal with currency conversion, an algorithm that picks the best block of seats for a group, and a ticket-sale module with event series.
| Earlier freelance · Full-Stack Developer, Upwork | Jun 2017 to 2020 |
- SaaS products, e-commerce sites, and landing pages for clients around the world, and front-end lead on the early team projects (React, jQuery, CSS). This is where the Top Rated Plus and 100% Job Success record began, across 24 contracts and more than 1,500 hours. Registered as a sole trader in Albania for straightforward international invoicing.
Projects
My own products. I set the direction, made the product and architecture calls, and reviewed every surface. The implementation is agent-written, which is how I work now.
| Real estate portal for Albania | 2026, pre-launch |
- Stripe does not serve Albanian-registered businesses, so rather than wait on a provider I took billing to bank-transfer invoicing carrying Albanian TVSH, which is enough to launch on.
- Gave agents their own workspace on a subdomain instead of a section of the site, sharing one login across both.
- Anything slow runs as a background job rather than inside the request, which covers image processing, search indexing, saved-search alerts and agency feed imports.
| selfcrafted · a job-search platform | 2026 |
- Kept submission human by construction. Nothing is ever sent without someone tapping approve, which is the quality line and the compliance line at once.
- Ran the loop server-side on a schedule rather than on the phone, because a phone cannot be relied on to wake up.
- Split drafting across two model tiers, a cheap one for the first read and a strong one for anything written, with the static part of the prompt cached.
Education
BSc, Computer Science. University of Tirana, Faculty of Natural Sciences. Oct 2016 to Jul 2019.
Languages
Albanian (native). English (fluent, across nine years of daily work with US and German teams).