Staicu Alexandru Ovidiu

Core engineer on a live, real money web game platform with 30+ titles (getzoot.us). Grew from shipping reskins to owning entire game families end to end (Crash, Plinko, Mines, Tower, Dice) as sole developer on 30+ released titles: client, rendering, betting UI SDK, game servers and AWS infra. Top contributor on 12 of the org's 43 repositories; #3 of 14 by commit volume.

• Performance: rebuilt the asset loading pipeline, lifting in game performance from ~5-10 FPS to 40-60 FPS across most titles; React memoization gave a 25-50% overall speed gain; reusable components cut build time ~90%.
• Correctness where money moves: fixed a floating point payout bug with integer first math; traced a “poisoned round” incident down to per scenario wallet impact; built a deterministic seed based round simulator and confirmed a game's max win (3000×) over 18,000+ rounds, with RTP validated across millions of simulated rounds.
• Exploit hardening: drove fixes for real money exploit vectors: client state manipulation, an identity spoofing / RTP selection path, open CORS and wildcard postMessage origins.
• Backend & infra: built real time multiplayer game servers (Express + socket.io + RGS); migrated a game backend off a hosted BaaS onto our own Express service; ran AWS (ECS Fargate) via Pulumi; configured Vercel and SQL data for launched games.
• Delivery with AI agents: shipped a full live game (World Champions) whose codebase I built by directing AI coding agents under my own review; caught agent failures that would have shipped (a release that never actually rebuilt; an unimplemented rollback policy); sole author of the team's internal AI context and tooling setup.
• Ownership & team: sole author of an internal game onboarding tool (golden + integration tests); sustained peaks of ~30K concurrent players; mentored 3 developers; worked closely with the art team.

A personal lab, built solo alongside my full time role, with AI coding agents working under my own specs, tests and review. It spans 5 systems with 10,000+ automated checks and dated decision records.

• Local LLM platform: a Python tool that installs, health checks, benchmarks and serves local LLMs behind an OpenAI compatible API on a 16 GB mini PC with no discrete GPU. Models are checksum verified and must pass a canary check before serving; MTP speculative decoding gave ~2× faster generation.
• Agents that call tools: evaluated 10 small LLMs on 48 tool use tasks and a multistep harness of 20 scenarios scored on end state; the primary models scored 20/20. Found that a fast small model can act on invented values while reporting the correct ones, and designed a grounding guard plus an agent contract that blocks those actions, making a ~2.4× faster model usable (19/20).
• Speech AI: offline Romanian transcription with speaker diarization (Whisper + NVIDIA Sortformer): ~95% of words attributed to the correct speaker, 8-15% WER, transcript and subtitle output.
• AI notes web app: a multiuser TypeScript app on Cloudflare Workers / Durable Objects / D1 with ~900 tests. The AI only proposes changes (undo or accept); per role model fallback chains, spending caps, and an MCP server that exposes notes to external agents.
• Secure device fleet: messaging between machines over SSH with no open ports on devices, an append only audit log and human approval for dangerous operations. A private OpenAI compatible AI gateway logs whether each request ran locally or in the cloud.
• Ops stack for ~10 machines: machine provisioning from a USB stick, a private VPN mesh, a self hosted git server with LFS (34 GB Unity project), test gated deploys, encrypted backups, and AI helpers that explain and vet scripts without ever executing AI output.
• AI cost & knowledge tooling: measured AI cost per operation with golden set regression checks to move mechanical work into scripts; built a verified facts knowledge base served to agents over MCP.

Independent Unity studio; full ownership of design, code, optimization and release. 3 titles shipped; next, Roots and Runes (3D cozy RPG) is Coming Soon on Steam.

• The Shrouded Parchments: 3D RPG released on Windows & Linux; full cycle development, including animation, code and performance.
• Astroblast Rampage: 3D arcade space shooter built from scratch; heavily optimized for low end devices.
• Jigsaw Artistry: 2D puzzle game; 1,000+ unique puzzles, achievements, missions, trivia.
• In progress: a 2D RPG prototype where code owns the rules (dice, combat, map) and a local LLM generates rooms, NPC dialogue and narration.

• Contributed to released casual casino mobile titles, including Scratch Cards Pro, Scratch Cash, Plinko World, Spin 4 Cash and Money Slots; integrated PayPal payouts, Firebase and PlayFab across GitLab / Bitbucket pipelines; wrote internal tech guides for the team.

• Delivered personal and client Unity projects across 2D/3D; collaborated on the released title Zombie War (Divine Code Productions).

• HTSS (2019-2021): Sales Force Automation software for pharmaceutical sales (real time stock, order processing); hackathon judge. .NET (C#), Angular.
• Direct Vision (2017-2019): enhanced the WBE Travel platform (incl. mobile) and delivered JacTravel's travel solution on top of it, integrating multiple XML/JSON travel providers. .NET (C#), MVC, SQL.
• Softelligence (2015-2016): full stack delivery for fintech clients (Idea Bank, Orange, Ocean Credit), including online crediting, reporting and DB/procedure optimization. .NET, T-SQL.
• Indaco Systems (2014-2015): led a team of 4 on an online insurance policy platform (Astra Asigurări, Slovakia branch); performance, security and reporting (Crystal Reports).
• Inteli Management Systems (2012-2013): reporting, SQL procedures and data migration for a public sector tax application. C#, ASP.NET, SQL.