Graduate Student
MSc at ETH Zürich, working with the Systems Group
I work on the layers most people never have to think about: networks, Linux and the hardware that moves packets around. For two years I helped keep Jump Trading’s low-latency trading systems alive in data centres around the world.
Now I’m in Zürich doing a master’s at ETH, majoring in Secure and Reliable Systems with a minor in Systems Software. Off the clock I love to play padel. Still trying to hit that perfect bandeja.
What I’m currently building
DENIM
Dynamic Endpoint Network Impairment Model
A hardware module that breaks your network on purpose, at line rate, on the FPGA itself so you can find out what an RDMA stack does when the network misbehaves.
- RDMA bypasses the kernel. That is the entire point of it, and also the problem: no software tool can drop a packet or set an ECN bit where it would matter. The published answer, Lumina, injects those events from a programmable Tofino switch, which means dedicated hardware, sitting in the middle of your network, unable to be co-designed with the endpoint’s own transport logic.
- DENIM moves that job to the endpoint. You write a rule like
PSN 50-150 : delay 1us, software parses it and programs it through Coyote’s control plane. From then on a filter classifies packets on QPN, PSN, IP address and opcode, and routes the matches through effect blocks such as an ECN marker, a drop or a FIFO that holds a packet for a configurable number of microseconds. Everything else bypasses DENIM untouched. - Semester project in the Systems Group at ETH Zürich, advised by Maximilian Heer and Benjamin Ramhorst under Prof. Gustavo Alonso.
Coyote v2 on GitHub ↗Coyote v2 paper ↗Lumina (SIGCOMM ’23) ↗
Where I’ve worked
- Oct 2024May 2026
- Kept low-latency trading systems healthy while they were live, which mostly meant diagnosing Linux, network and application problems on a clock, with traders, developers, clearing and risk all wanting an answer at the same time.
- Handled day-to-day configuration on network devices across global data centres, including standing up new BGP sessions whenever we needed new connectivity.
- Automated manual production workflows with Python / Ansible. Also built a real-time market data event listener to satisfy a compliance requirement.
- Advocated for applications emitting metrics into ClickHouse and built the Grafana dashboards on top, to help with observability during oncall shifts.
- Jul 2024Sep 2024
- A summer building a Python project that tidied up several internal business processes.
- My team owned application deployment, so it was my first proper go at Ansible: playbooks, roles, and learning to trust a run that reports no changes.
- Jul 2023Sep 2023
- Built a ticket management system for a Bundesliga football club, React and TypeScript for the frontend, Python and Flask for the backend.
- Provisioned the Google Cloud side as code with Terraform. My first proper encounter with infrastructure you describe rather than click, and I have not gone back.
- Apr 2023Jun 2023
Sourcer
Software Engineering Intern
Delft, NL
- Built NewsCop, which detects overlap between news articles.
- Django API endpoints and document fingerprinting that decides whether two articles are extremely similar.
- Deployed the application as containerised services to AWS.
- Sep 2022Jun 2024
TU Delft
Head Teaching Assistant & Student Mentor
Delft, NL
- Coordinated labs for several courses, gave students feedback on assignments and helped organise exams.
- Weekly meetings with freshmen students on how to study at university.
Education
- 2026–nowETH Zürich — MSc Computer ScienceIn progress — expected Feb 2028
- 2021–2024Delft University of Technology — BSc Computer Science and EngineeringGPA 9.04/10, graduated cum laude · Honours Programme, competitive programming track
- 2017–2021"Emil Racovita" National College — Computer Science & MathematicsGPA 9.96/10
Things I’ve made
Multiple hackathon builds and university projects, labelled as such. The ones listed below are the most interesting ones to me.
- Hackathon2023
BGP looking glass
A looking glass for BGP routing data, built at an NL-ix hackathon.
- Wrote an awk script to parse routing data and pushed it into ClickHouse, a column-oriented database that turns out to be very good at answering "show me every route that changed in this window".
- University project2023
Home Owners Association Management
A microservice system for running a home owners association: boards, members, the works.
- Built the authentication service: JWT issuing and verification, and the access control that hangs off it.
- Built the home owners microservice, where members create and manage community boards, persisted in MySQL.
- University project2022
Energy Quiz
A multiplayer trivia game about energy use. Kahoot! but the questions make you feel bad about your tumble dryer.
- REST APIs over Spring for everything the clients needed to agree on.
- Long-polling to keep players in sync and JavaFX for the UI.
- Scores and user state in an in-memory SQL database.
Toolbox
- Languages
- JavaPythonC++TypeScriptBash
- Infrastructure
- LinuxDockerKubernetesTerraformAnsibleGrafanaClickHouse
- Frameworks
- SpringReactDjangoFastAPIFlask
- Spoken
- Romanian (native)English (C2)German (B2)French (B1)