~/cristian.radulescu/dev-notes

About

PHP developer · Symfony · Team lead · Craiova, Romania (working remotely)

I have been building web applications with PHP for almost 20 years, most of them with Symfony, from version 1 to 6. I have worked in telecom and in large e-commerce and marketplace platforms, and I have spent years leading teams as well as writing code. I enjoy taking over legacy code and making it faster, more reliable and easier to change.

Email · GitHub · Download resume (PDF)

Experience

Support and maintenance lead / PHP Developer, Swibeco

Mar 2023 – present · Lausanne, Switzerland (remote)

  • Lead the team responsible for bug fixes and small features across Swibeco's existing backend applications.
  • The ecosystem has several in-house Symfony applications (user management, communication management and others) and an e-commerce platform built on Sylius.
  • Stack: PHP, Symfony 4–6, Sylius, API Platform, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, GitLab, unit and functional testing.

PHP Developer, Made.com (via Pentalog)

May 2022 – Dec 2022 · Iasi, Romania (remote)

  • Worked on the backend of the online stores of a furniture retailer selling in the UK and several EU countries, built on headless Magento 2.
  • The backend was part of an event-driven microservice ecosystem that used EventStore for events and GraphQL and REST APIs for communication, hosted on AWS and provisioned with Terraform.
  • Projects: headless Magento 2 store backend, Returns app.
  • Stack: PHP 7, Magento 2, Symfony 4, MySQL, GraphQL, REST, AWS, Terraform, Consul, Nomad, Docker, CI pipelines, monitoring.

Team Leader, eMAG

Nov 2019 – May 2022 · Craiova, Romania

  • Led a team working on after-sales operations: product returns, repair service, order cancellation and replacement orders.
  • The main application was upgraded from Symfony 3.4 to 4.4 during this time.
  • Handled people management and incident management in addition to development.
  • Stack: PHP 7, Symfony 4, MySQL, REST, SOAP, caching, Docker, CI pipelines, monitoring, Scrum.

PHP Developer, eMAG

Oct 2018 – Nov 2019 · Craiova, Romania

  • Returned to hands-on development on the Marketplace platform, which manages the sellers on eMAG.
  • Worked mainly on seller onboarding (registration and validation) and seller account management. The application was upgraded from Symfony 3.4 to 4 during this time.
  • Stack: PHP 7, Symfony 3 and 4, MySQL, REST, unit testing, Scrum.

Hub Manager, eMAG

Jun 2014 – Sep 2018 · Craiova, Romania

  • Grew the Craiova IT hub from 5 to 20 people in three teams (developers and QA), each with its own team leader.
  • Responsible for people management, project planning, communication and office management.
  • Built my own tools to automate administrative work, ran technical workshops for colleagues and joined development teams when they needed extra capacity.
  • Skills: leadership, people management, project planning, change management, mentoring, basic finance.

Team Leader, eMAG

Aug 2013 – Jun 2014 · Craiova, Romania

  • First team leader of eMAG's first IT hub outside Bucharest, leading 5 developers.
  • Moved the vouchers workflows out of the existing monolith into a new Symfony 2 application.
  • Planned milestones with the product owner, reported to headquarters and was the hub's contact for HR, accounting and facilities.
  • Stack: PHP 5, Symfony 2, MySQL, REST, unit testing, Scrum.

PHP Developer, NetRom Software

Sep 2008 – Jul 2013 · Craiova, Romania

  • Built the intranet, the customer self-service portal and B2B integrations for a Dutch telecom company with Symfony 1.
  • Built the service ordering flow: a multi-step form in which each step was generated dynamically from the answers to the previous ones.
  • Worked at the same time on a similar, smaller project with Symfony 2.
  • Stack: PHP 5, Symfony 1 and 2, MySQL, SOAP, Subversion, Git, Scrum.

PHP Developer, PublicBet

Sep 2006 – Oct 2007 · Craiova, Romania

  • Maintained the website and weekly magazine of a sports betting company.
  • Rewrote the in-house scraper for standings and results in CakePHP. Runtime dropped from about 4 hours to under 1 hour, and a failed run could resume where it stopped instead of losing the data collected so far.
  • After the company was acquired, continued remotely and later rebuilt the application with Symfony 1 (sport-statistics).
  • Stack: PHP 5, CakePHP, MySQL, JavaScript, web scraping.

Skills

  • Backend: PHP, Symfony, Sylius, API Platform, Magento 2, REST, GraphQL, SOAP
  • Data and messaging: MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, EventStore
  • Testing: PHPUnit, Codeception, unit and functional testing
  • Tooling and infrastructure: Git, SVN, Docker, Linux and the Unix CLI, CI pipelines, AWS, Terraform
  • Also: Node.js, Python (scripting)
  • Leadership: team leading, people management, project planning, mentoring

Education

Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, Craiova, Romania. Engineering degree.

Languages

Romanian (native) · English (fluent)