Alex Lazar
I'm a product-focused engineer with almost a decade of experience building web products for early-stage startups. I run LeetSoftware, my development shop, and I've founded or co-founded 8+ products of my own. My current work covers LLM-backed products and evaluation systems, but I have a background in financial/blockchain data pipelines.
Key achievements
- Built core product workflows for IconicShift, an AI platform for founder and executive accountability that helps founders define company strategy, plan execution and assign responsibility to team members, using company documents as context.
- Built Job Fiend, a job-search agent that automates job discovery and screening, helping job seekers find relevant opportunities and manage applications and interviews in one place.
- 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.
Favorite Tech Stack
I've worked with a broader range of technologies, but these are my current favorites.
- Programming languages: TypeScript, Python, Rust.
- Backend: Django, Express.js.
- Frontend: React, anything from Tanstack, Inertia.js, React Router.
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis.
- Infrastructure & monitoring: AWS, Railway, Terraform, Docker, BetterStack, Sentry.
- AI/LLM: Langfuse, OpenRouter, Jev.
Experience
I contract for startups through my development shop, working as an architect and individual contributor. I've also led teams of up to five, managed roadmaps and made hiring decisions.
- Built core features for IconicShift, an AI platform for founder and executive accountability. Used LLMs to review uploaded documents against company strategy and turn founder-approved business goals into milestones with accountable owners.
- Built a trading platform that processed thousands of market data points per second from Binance for Paragon.
- Built an indexer and relayer for XGame (EVM gaming dApp) which achieved $300k volume in its first week
Dextrac provides infrastructure for Chainlink, a market-leading data network for blockchain applications, supplying real-world information such as market prices.
- Led development of PRISM, an analytics platform for tracking the reliability and performance of Chainlink data feeds across 15 blockchains. Built its data pipeline processing 10M+ transactions per month.
- Built an API and dashboard for exploring the data, with payments and access controls for paid subscriptions.
- Presented PRISM at Chainlink's SmartCon in Barcelona.
Toucan built infrastructure for trading and tracking carbon credits on blockchain networks. Its platform surpassed $2B in trading volume.
- Built and maintained an open-source TypeScript SDK for integrating carbon credits into applications. Contributed to tools that combine purchasing and retiring credits into one transaction, and managed community contributions.
- Built the bridge interface for transferring carbon assets between blockchain networks, and automated deployment of hundreds of carbon-credit tokens.
- Presented Toucan's developer tools at ETHAmsterdam, LFGrow and ETHDenver, and to teams at 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
Job Fiend (formerly Job Finder)
- Built an AI-powered job-search platform that discovers and screens roles against each customer's approved criteria and brings applications and interviews into one place. Added evals before releasing AI changes and per-customer spending controls.
- Publish product demos and technical explainers on AI and software engineering, and host interviews with founders and engineers about building products and running software businesses.
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.