Istvan Hoka

Istvan Hoka

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Software Engineer & Startup CTO
Cluj-Napoca, Cluj County, Romania
Contact Istvan regarding: 
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Starting at USD7.2k/month
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Starting at USD100/hour
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Résumé

Jobs verified_user 0% verified
  • n
    Site Reliability Engineer
    notonthehighstreet.com
    Jan 2026 - Current (10 months)
    Returning to Not On The High Street in a Site Reliability Engineering role, focusing on platform reliability, observability, and infrastructure excellence.
  • Not On The High Street
    Site Reliability Engineer
    Not On The High Street
    Jan 2026 - Current (10 months)
  • T
    Fractional CTO
    TORY LLC
    Oct 2025 - Current (1 year 1 month)
  • T
    Fractional CTO
    Tory, LLC
    Oct 2025 - Current (1 year 1 month)
    Strategic Technology Leadership:
    • Define and execute TORY's technical vision and product roadmap
    • Oversee all technology architecture decisions and infrastructure
    • Lead AI/ML feature development and integration strategy
    • Ensure scalability and performance as we grow to 500K+ ARR
    • Guide build vs. buy decisions for technology components
    Product & Engineering Excellence:
    • Maintain 99.5%+ uptime for production systems
    • Ensure 90%+ on-time delivery of planned releases
    • Drive crash-free rate above 99% through quality engineering
    • Manage technical debt with quarterly assessment and reduction plans
    • Oversee iOS app evolution, Android and web platform launch preparation
  • i
    Principal Owner
    ihokame
    Jul 2025 - Current (1 year 4 months)
  • Builderai
    Principal Engineer
    Builderai
    May 2023 - May 2025 (2 years 1 month)
    Led technical transformation across 4 engineering teams for the Application Assembly and Building Blocks platform serving hundreds of SME customers.

    Key Achievements:

    - Architected stack-agnostic platform supporting Ruby/Rails, Python/Django/FastAPI, and Node.js/Next.js backends with React/React Native frontends
    - Built BlockSmith GenAI framework for automated component maintenance, reducing manual work by 90%
    - Designed CI/CD pipelines for 500+ components, enabling hundreds of daily deployments (previously one every several weeks)
    - Created Blocks Workspace for turn-key local development, cutting developer onboarding from days to minutes
    - Established versioning policies and SemVer adoption for 500
  • B
    Principal (Staff) Engineer
    Builder.ai
    May 2023 - May 2025 (2 years 1 month)
    Led technical transformation across 4 engineering teams focused on Application Assembly and Building Blocks platform serving hundreds of SME customers.
    Strategic Architecture & Standards
    • Designed new platform architecture supporting stack-agnostic backends (Python/Django/FastAPI, Node.js/Next.js) with React & React Native frontends, moving away from a single stack support, while reducing the complexity of stack upgrades by proper employment of separation of concerns.
    • Defined versioning and maintenance policies for 500+ software components, enabling adoption of SemVer, and ensuring compatibility between components.
    • Established error handling and testing standards, improving components reliability and security.
  • Builderai
    Staff Software Engineer
    Builderai
    May 2023 - May 2025 (2 years 1 month)
    Led technical transformation across 4 engineering teams for the Application Assembly and Building Blocks platform serving hundreds of SME customers.

    Key Achievements:

    - Architected stack-agnostic platform supporting Ruby/Rails, Python/Django/FastAPI, and Node.js/Next.js backends with React/React Native frontends
    - Built BlockSmith GenAI framework for automated component maintenance, reducing manual work by 90%
    - Designed CI/CD pipelines for 500+ components, enabling hundreds of daily deployments (previously one every several weeks)
    - Created Blocks Workspace for turn-key local development, cutting developer onboarding from days to minutes
    - Established versioning policies and SemVer adoption for 500
  • n
    Solutions Architect
    notonthehighstreet.com
    Apr 2022 - Apr 2023 (1 year 1 month)
    Transitioned from the role of Principal Engineer after the departure of the Head of Architecture, as it became apparent that the organisation was in need of a more structured architecture function.
    • Established a more structured architecture framework for the tech team.
    • Continued developing and evolving solution designs for the organisation.
    • Product Catalogue: replatform from legacy system to become the aggregation point of product data target architecture, solution design, implementation governance.
    • Product Information Management: introduce new capabilities to enable better understanding of product taxonomy when indexing, and allow granular stock management solution design, implemetation governance.
    • Guest
  • notonthehighstreet
    Software Solutions Architect
    notonthehighstreet
    Apr 2022 - Mar 2023 (1 year)
    Solution designs for new Product Variants capabilities.
  • n
    Principal Engineer
    notonthehighstreet.com
    Feb 2020 - Apr 2022 (2 years 3 months)
    • New payment method ApplePay: target architecture, solution design and implementation governance.
    • New stock management capability: target architecture, solution design and implementation governance.
    • Rethink approach to asynchronous messaging, from a home-grown solution, to leveraging more of the AWS infrastructure, and reduce coupling.
  • notonthehighstreet
    Principal Software Engineer
    notonthehighstreet
    Feb 2020 - Apr 2022 (2 years 3 months)
    Solution design for new Stock Management capability.
  • notonthehighstreet
    Software Engineer (Contract, RubyPine)
    notonthehighstreet
    Jul 2018 - Jan 2020 (1 year 7 months)
    Re-platforming monolithic Ruby on Rails application: Basket, Checkout experiences extracted from monolith. Performance testing across the entire platform to ensure stability during Peak trading.
  • R
    Owner
    RubyPine
    Jun 2018 - Feb 2020 (1 year 9 months)
    Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultancy services.
  • n
    Senior Software Engineer
    notonthehighstreet.com
    Jun 2018 - Jan 2020 (1 year 8 months)
    Hired initially as a senior Ruby engineer to work on payment systems, became de-facto tech lead of the Payment team.
    • Lead re-platforming projects for Basket and Checkout extract systems from monolithic architecture into domain aligned components. Lead design and implementation for APIs, microservices based on Node.js, GraphQL.
    • Troubleshooted and fixed a compound precision and rounding problem in the tax system, which reduced the companies tax liability significantly.
    • Completed previously started implementation of gift card capability, using GiveX as an external provider.
  • D
    CTO (Contract, Aissac)
    Digital Takeover LLC
    Mar 2015 - Mar 2018 (3 years 1 month)
    • Design, develop digital publishing and analytics tool for modern journalism team.
    • Develop fully responsive digital magazine website, mobile applications.
    • Scale digital magazine website to 50MM+ visitors/mo.
    • Research, implement technical solutions.
    • Recruit and lead development team.
  • D
    CTO
    Digital Takeover
    Mar 2015 - Mar 2018 (3 years 1 month)
    Media/content startup, leveraging Facebook heavily to drive traffic, Digital Takeover owned 2 web properties driving 50 million monthly visitors at its height.
    • Online publishing workflow tool with real-time collaboration: architecture, design, implementation. Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, MySQL, Wordpress.
    • Real-time KPI dashboard, aggregating multiple sources of data: traffic, revenue, social engagement. Architecture, design, implementation. Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, MySQL, Facebook Graph API, Google Analytics, advertiser APIs.
    • Web API serving up to 50MM visitors/month to enhance online magazine with social features: voting, popularity. Architecture, implementation. Ruby on Rails.
    • Custom online magazine theme for Wordp
  • Z
    CTO
    ZenCash.com
    Aug 2011 - Mar 2015 (3 years 8 months)
    ZenCash was an "Accounts Receivable CRM", a tool meant to help B2B collect payment from their clients faster, by means of a follow-up plan over email, phone and the post. ZenCash was started as a spin-off by the same owners as Blinksale. Through my consulting company, Aissac, I acted as the leader in technical strategy and development.
    • Hired and trained development team.
    • High-throughput event based system, custom API bindings for 7 invoicing applications, for highly efficient data synchronisation.
    • 3rd party integrations for print, post and phone solution providers.
    • Web application frontend for customers and back-office management.
    • Provided technical leadership, architecture and implementation (in part) for
  • Z
    CTO (Contract, Aissac)
    ZenCash
    Aug 2011 - Mar 2015 (3 years 8 months)
    Leading development, responsible with building and managing several Ruby on Rails applications that power ZenCash.
  • Blinksale
    CTO (Contract, Aissac)
    Blinksale
    Jan 2011 - Dec 2018 (8 years)
    Evaluate, identify and implement technologies, design and develop services, identify business goals and opportunities, define software development methodology.
  • B
    CTO
    Blinksale.com
    Jan 2011 - Dec 2018 (8 years)
    Blinksale is an invoicing application, one of the first webapps built with Ruby on Rails. Through my consulting company, Aissac, I acted as the leader in technical strategy and development.
    • Hired and trained additional developers.
    • Migrated application from VPS hosting to PaaS (AWS + EngineYard).
    • Implemented CI/CD, backfilled integration and unit testing.
    • New features added: BlinkPay (Stripe-like merchant solution, complete with underwriting process, zero-configuration for payments), Estimates.
    • Provided technical leadership, architecture for all new capabilities.
    • Re-built the invoincing platform with an API-first design, and modern Ember.js web frontend.
    • Assisted with selling Blinksale to a ne
  • Blinksale
    Lead Developer
    Blinksale
    Jan 2010 - Dec 2011 (2 years)
    Develop new features, improve existing code base.
  • B
    Lead Developer
    Blinksale.com
    Jan 2010 - Dec 2010 (1 year)
    First contact with the new owner of Blinksale, hired as lead developer.
    • Ruby on Rails development
  • Universitatea Tehnică din ClujNapoca
    Assist. Researcher, Stag.
    Universitatea Tehnică din ClujNapoca
    Apr 2006 - Aug 2008 (2 years 5 months)
    Design, develop and document experimental web portal.
  • A
    Founder
    Aissac
    Sep 2005 - Current (21 years 2 months)
    Co-founded Aissac SRL, a small development shop focused on web development, using Ruby on Rails as the primary development framework. Overtime I became the sole owner of the business.
Education verified_user 0% verified
  • Technical University of Cluj Napoca
    Bachelor's degree, Computer science and information systems
    Technical University of Cluj Napoca
    Jan 2000 - Dec 2005 (6 years)
    Hardware and software engineering. Automation.
  • Universitatea Tehnică din ClujNapoca
    Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca
    Universitatea Tehnică din ClujNapoca
    Jan 2000 - Jan 2005 (5 years 1 month)
  • Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
    BSE Automation and Computer Science
    Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
    Jan 2000 - Jan 2005 (5 years 1 month)
  • C
    Bachelor of Science (BS, Computer Science
    Colegiului Naţional Gheorghe Lazăr Sibiu
    Jan 1996 - Dec 2000 (5 years)
    Computer science
Projects (professional or personal) verified_user 0% verified
  • S
    Sleek Bill
    Jul 2016 - Aug 2018 (2 years 2 months)
    Invoicing software for India. Modern web application built with Ruby on Rails, Ember.js.
  • B
    Blinksale
    Jan 2010 - Sep 2020 (10 years 9 months)
    Blinksale is an invoicing tool for small businesses, written in Ruby on Rails. My team took over from the original creators and contributed: • Estimates functionality. • Blinkpay - homegrown merchant solution, complete with backend underwriting application. It was eventually retired in favour of Stripe. • Stripe integration allowing invoice creators to get paid directly. • UI redesign. • Fresh custom templates for invoices. • Cascading options from account to client to invoice level. • Full unit and system integration test suite with Continuous Integration. • Cloud deployment with redundancy and horizontal scaling. • iOS mobile app built with RubyMotion. My team continually maintains Blinksale and is working on the next version - Blinksale
Publications verified_user 0% verified
  • Builderai
    Upgrading Intelligence: How We Use AI For Automatically Upgrading Rails And React Native
    Builderai
    Nov 2024
    Streamline your app upgrades by embracing AI experimentation