// hello, world

Radu Dan Chiorean

I build full-stack products that move the numbers.

See the work →Get in touch
radu.ts
const radu = {
  role: "Software Developer",
  years: 11,
  stack: ["React", "Node", "GraphQL"],
  shipsResults: true,
}▋

01 about

About

I'm a software developer with 11+ years shipping products end to end — from React front-ends to Node.js and GraphQL services, with a Java and AWS past I still lean on.

Most of my recent work lives in food and restaurant tech, where I like problems that are equal parts product and engineering: payments, partner integrations, and the kind of flows where shaving seconds or cutting error rates is the whole point.

I care about clean, well-tested code that other people can build on — and about results you can put a number next to.

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Years in software — 7 as a senior

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Features shipped

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Technologies used

02 the road so far

The road so far

School to shipping. The main road is the career; each company's projects branch off as side-roads — and the road paves itself in that company's colour as you scroll.

  1. 2005—2015 · Learning

    Foundation

    A decade of school & university

    From first lines of code in high school to an engineering master's degree.

    2005—2009

    Colegiul Tehnic Alesandru Papiu Ilarian

    Mathematics & Informatics · Zalău

    First lines of code — the moment building things became the plan.

    2009—2013

    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

    BSc, Electrical, Electronics & Communications Engineering

    Where the engineering foundations clicked.

    2013—2015

    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

    MSc, Electrical & Electronics Engineering

    Computer-aided design in electrical engineering.

  2. 2015—2018

    Xoomworks (now Accenture)

    Mid Java Developer · Manual / Automated QA

    Project

    Xoomworks Academy

    Internal internship — a month each of Java development, manual testing and automation testing. Took 1st place in the Java track and carried on as a Java developer from there.

    • Java
    • Spring
    • Git
    • REST
    • Selenium
    Project

    Click.Travel

    Modernised a travel-itinerary platform that was going technologically obsolete — lifted performance and dev speed with three layers of tests (unit, integration, E2E), and it became the company-wide standard for clean code.

    • Java
    • Spring
    • DDD
    • DynamoDB
    • AWS Lambda
    • AWS S3
    • AWS SNS
    • AWS SQS
    • AWS CloudFormation
  3. 2018—2019

    Lateral

    React Developer · Node.js

    Project

    Vendor & Partner Portal

    Built two React apps — one for waste-management companies, one for their customers — using Redux for state and talking to a .NET backend over REST. Shipped bug fixes and enhancements, built an admin dashboard, and prototyped a live Google Maps view tracking the waste-collection trucks.

    • React
    • Redux
    • REST
    • Google Maps
    Project

    Switch your provider

    A responsive React web app that lets people switch their waste-management provider in just a couple of clicks.

    • React
    Project

    Container checkout

    A static order form wired to the customer's payment service and deployed to Amazon S3 — quick container orders with no backend needed.

    • React
    • AWS S3
    Project

    Skincare curation app

    Full-stack developer

    My last project at Lateral — and the one I built solo, full stack. A photo-based curation app for an acne specialist: users submit photos and get back ratings and advice, reviewed through a fast, swipe-based card interface.

    • React
    • Styled Components
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • AWS S3
  4. 2019—2021

    FoodStyles

    Senior React / Node.js & React Native

    Project

    Bootstrapping a restaurant database

    Built the foundation of FoodStyles' restaurant database — the data the whole app stands on. Imported the UK government's open food-hygiene records to create 485,782 locations, then auto-defined 380,510 brands (restaurant chains) with a custom algorithm. Enriched the dataset through Google's APIs for ~60% more detail, refining the merge logic from 60% → 85% accuracy, and saved roughly €10,000 with a caching layer in front of Google. Shipped a web app so the client could define 2,500+ menus and keep everything current — all on a microservices architecture.

    • React
    • GraphQL
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • PostgreSQL
    • Kafka
    • Socket.io
    • Google APIs
    Project

    Fix it with a photo

    A crowdsourced companion app that turned customers into data fixers: spot a restaurant pinned in the wrong place, snap a photo, and submit the correction on the spot. Built as a React Native app talking GraphQL to a Node.js + Express backend, with Google Maps guiding users to the location. Social logins smoothed sign-up (×3 onboarding) and in-app PayPal payments lifted user contributions by 3× — together cutting location confusion, and the bad reviews it caused, to virtually zero.

    • React Native
    • GraphQL
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • PostgreSQL
    • AWS S3
    Project

    Feeding a pre-ChatGPT AI

    Long before Claude or ChatGPT made this look easy, the client wanted an AI to read a restaurant's menu and sort each dish — vegan, fish, allergens, dietary info — but the model was starving for training data. So I cooked it a feast: a recipe-scraping engine that gathered over 500,000 recipes, scaled horizontally by packaging it into a Docker image and running it on Google Cloud. The extra data lifted the model's confidence by 2% and opened the door to new customers who needed ingredient-level dietary information.

    • Node.js
    • Express
    • PostgreSQL
    • Puppeteer
    • Docker
    • Google Cloud Platform
    Project

    A control room for scrapers

    As menus changed, scrapers silently broke — and stale allergen and dietary data is the kind of bug that costs a food app real customers. So I built the control room: an internal web app that tracked which restaurants had scraping instructions, flagged which were failing, and categorised them by shape (menu with sections, menu with submenu and section, and so on). A one-click tool grouped and tested instructions and kept their full history, so the team could see exactly what needed fixing — 200 instructions and counting, 30% more scraper productivity and 15% faster scraping-engine development.

    • React
    • GraphQL
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • PostgreSQL
    • Kafka
    • Mocha
    • Cucumber
  5. 2021—Present

    TheFork

    Senior Software Developer

    Project

    Apple partner integration

    TheFork's Apple booking integration ran on an old legacy bulk-sending flow. I rebuilt it on Apple's new Business Connect API: instead of batch uploads, it reacts to events flowing across multiple TheFork microservices and pushes updates to Apple in real time over their REST API. Two weeks after launch, bookings coming through Apple were up +3184% — and still climbing.

    • Node.js
    • RabbitMQ
    • JSON-RPC
    • REST
    • Microservices
    Project

    Pay-at-table by QR

    TheFork Pay, right at the table: scan a QR code and settle the bill in seconds, no waiting on the card machine. I built it end to end — backend and frontend. The proof it worked? At a company event we paid the bill by scanning the QR — and it was not a small bill. In its first months it handled 11k payments.

    • Node.js
    • React
    • JSON-RPC
    • Stripe
    • Styled Components
    Project

    Rebuilding the partner feeds

    Reworked the partner feeds — the way TheFork shares its data with partners. The hard part was the legacy code: making sense of a lot of gibberish, then going deep on SQL and learning dbt to reshape the data into exactly the form partners needed. The payoff — we retired the Talend subscription entirely, saving €20k+ a year.

    • Node.js
    • dbt
    • SQL
    • Snowflake
    • AWS S3
    Project

    Bringing gift cards in house

    Gift cards ran through a third-party provider so slow it caused errors on our side. I split the flow and made it async — a kind of optimistic locking — cutting response times from 15s → 4s and dropping errors sharply. Eventually we went all the way and built our own gift card manager from scratch; in-house, latency is now under 1s.

    • Node.js
    • JSON-RPC
    • Microservices
    • Stripe
    Project

    Booking from Google, done right

    When you book a restaurant from Google Maps and it needs a card — a guarantee or a prepayment — the booking flows through Google's end-to-end Reserve API. The old implementation leaned on a workaround that was never ideal. I built a proper landing page: customers enter their card details and review the full booking information and terms before confirming. The cleaner flow improved the UX and lifted the number of paid bookings coming through Google.

    • Reserve with Google
    • React
    • Node.js
    • Stripe
    • AWS S3
    • dbt
  6. Now · You are here

    Building what's next

    Cluj-Napoca · Remote

    Still shipping full-stack products that move the numbers.

03 stack

Stack

The tools I reach for, grouped by where they live.

Frontend

  • React
  • React Native
  • TypeScript
  • Next.js
  • Redux

Backend

  • Node.js
  • GraphQL
  • Java / Spring
  • REST

Data & infra

  • PostgreSQL
  • DynamoDB
  • RabbitMQ
  • Docker
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS S3

Craft

  • Unit / Integration / E2E testing
  • Cucumber
  • Stripe
  • Clean code

04 contact

Contact

Got a product that needs building — or a number that needs moving? Let's talk.

radudanchiorean@gmail.comGitHubLinkedIn