Hi there, I'm

Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer

Full-Stack · Backend · Data · Cloud

14+ years building and scaling software products - from early-stage systems to platforms serving millions of users.

Open to senior engineering roles and selected consulting engagements.

View Experience Download CV

Need a software delivery partner? Visit Corco Labs →

LinkedIn · GitHub · Career

Selected organisations I've worked with

Direct long-term engagements with Edukey and TES Global; the rest delivered as the engineer on projects contracted through partner agencies.

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

Edukey

Tes Global

Philips

RWE

Innogy

Danone

Red Bull

Les Mills

Radenska

I work across the whole stack - product features, backend services, data pipelines, infrastructure and deployment - and I take ownership of systems rather than tickets. Most of my work has been long-term: staying with a product through growth, rewrites and migrations, and mentoring the people who maintain it.

14+

Years Professional Experience

Millions

Of Platform Users Served

8 Years

Longest Single Engagement

Public Repositories On GitHub

Selected Engineering Experience

Long-running engagements where I owned systems end to end, not just features.

Edukey Education / TES Global

2015 - 2023 · 8 years

Senior Software Engineer

Joined as the first developer alongside the CTO and stayed for eight years, through the growth of ClassCharts from thousands of users into a platform serving millions across the UK education system, and through the acquisition by TES Global.

Scaled the platform from tens of thousands to millions of users - database and query optimization, caching, and resilient architecture.
Modernized the frontend, splitting a jQuery codebase into separate React micro apps.
Rewrote the mobile apps in React Native.
Built the CI/CD pipeline, containerized development and production, and set up the E2E and automated test infrastructure.
Led infrastructure migrations across Rackspace, GCP and AWS with migration tooling and no loss of service.
Mentored newly joined and junior developers, and owned technical decisions across the product line.

Read the case study →

MarketAlerts

2024 - 2026

Founding Engineer / CTO

Hands-on founding engineer for an AI-powered investment intelligence platform covering 20+ global markets, built end-to-end: web app, mobile app, CMS, data platform and infrastructure.

Built real-time market intelligence: AI watchlists monitoring stocks for earnings, analyst ratings, insider transactions and technical patterns.
Designed the backend and data platform - a monorepo with 100+ API endpoints, scheduled Airflow pipelines, crawlers and ETL workflows over SEC filings, news and market data.
Built an LLM-based classification system using hierarchical GPT models to categorize financial signals (M&A, guidance, products).
Owned architecture and infrastructure, including the cloud migration from AWS to GCP.

Read the case study →

Corco Labs

2012 - Present

Founder & Senior Software Engineer

Founded Corco Labs (previously Corcosoft), an independent software consultancy through which I have delivered software for startups, SMEs and enterprise clients - and the entity I contract long-term engagements through, which is why these dates overlap the roles above. The experience has given me end-to-end ownership across requirements, architecture, implementation, deployment, client communication and long-term support.

Independent and contract work spanning startups, SMEs and enterprise brands - among them Philips, RWE and Innogy - delivered directly and through partner agencies.
Tech lead and backend architect on a government smart-city IoT platform: 20+ microservices on Kubernetes with Kafka event streaming and Cassandra time-series storage.
Full lifecycle responsibility: scoping and estimation, architecture, delivery, deployment and ongoing maintenance.

Visit Corco Labs →

View All Case Studies

Featured Projects

A curated selection of things I've built outside client work - product platforms, data-heavy systems and open source - where I owned the architecture as well as the code.

WeWentCarRacing

A motorsport calendar covering 20+ racing series - F1/2/3/E, WEC, WRC, DTM, BTCC, IndyCar, NASCAR, MotoGP - plus every circuit they race on. The interesting part is the data layer: session times resolved into each visitor's local timezone, live weather per circuit, countdowns per session, and a lot of metadata stitched together from several sources. Built and run solo, and still shipping.

TypescriptAstroReactSQLiteDrizzle ORMDocker

Website →

MoaiTime

An open-source all-in-one productivity platform: calendar, tasks, habits, notes, focus sessions and mood tracking in one product rather than six separate tools. Full ownership end to end - data model, API, web client and deployment - which is really an exercise in keeping six interlocking domains coherent in a single codebase.

TypescriptReactNestJSPostgreSQLDockerCypress

GitHub → Blog Post →

OpenVoice Flow

A cross-platform desktop app for real-time voice transcription, built in Rust with Tauri. Multi-provider by design - Soniox and Whisper in the cloud, Ollama locally - behind a bring-your-own-key model, with a floating overlay for live feedback and searchable transcription history. Audio capture, streaming and native desktop integration in one, which is a very different set of problems from web work.

RustTauriReactTypeScriptSQLiteWebSockets

GitHub →

Metis

A personal project for aggregating, classifying, and indexing financial news articles. The system processed around 100,000 articles daily using a microservices architecture with specialized data stores - Clickhouse for analytics, Meilisearch for search, and Redis for caching. Event-driven processing via BullMQ handled the article pipeline.

TypescriptNestJSClickhouseMeilisearchRedisBullMQ

Blog Post →

Deep Gamer

An experimental machine learning project that creates an AI capable of learning game controls through screen capture and neural network training. Built with TensorFlow and Python, it uses Inception V3 architecture to process 640x360 gameplay footage and generates control outputs for autonomous gaming. Features a specialized "WASD Network" optimized for driving games and supports 9 different control actions.

PythonTensorFlowAI/ML

GitHub →

🎮 Babylon.js

Contributor to Babylon.js, the open-source WebGL 3D engine maintained by Microsoft and used by thousands of developers. Contributions upstream into an engine that size mean working to someone else's review standards and API constraints, which is a useful counterweight to owning every decision on your own projects.

TypeScriptWebGL3D GraphicsOpen Source

My contributions → Project →

Want to see more?

These are just highlights. The full list spans educational platforms, energy management systems, IoT infrastructure and more open source work.

View All Projects

What People I've Worked With Say

Colleagues, managers and founders I've worked alongside - several of them over many years:

" I worked with Borut for 7 years, he was our longest serving developer and he was an excellent person to work with. Borut always feels & displays a high level of responsibility to the project and the team and brought immense value to what we were trying to achieve, he understood our vision & grew with our codebase to become a hugely valued developer who you could rely on & would always deliver. Time keeping, attention to detail & working with others were never a problem. Borut worked on each of our products, working with different team members, platforms and codebase & responsibilities. I have zero hesitation in recommending Borut as he is an intelligent & hard working individual with a good sense of humour and liked by the rest of the team - he was a huge asset! "

Duncan Wilson CEO @ Edukey Education Ltd

" Borut is an amazing developer who throws himself at all different types of challenges and has been our very own secret James Bond, because only we know how awesome he is, while the rest of the business are oblivious of the impact he has, but now it's time to change that! "

Valter Cunha Tech Lead @ TES Global

" Borut delivered immediate value after joining our team. He brought clarity to complex problems, unlocked efficiency, and significantly increased throughput. He quickly identified mission-critical technical debt and resolved it on schedule. Borut communicates clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders and consistently connects technical concepts to practical business goals. His experience enables him to leverage AI to accelerate delivery without compromising quality. We were fortunate to have him on board and would gladly collaborate with him again or recommend him for any project. "

Vito Martin CEO @ ZeroSigma Capital

" It has been an absolute pleasure working with you over the past five years. In 25 years of coding, you are one of the most gifted developers I have ever worked with and an all round great guy. "

Simon Beckett Senior Software Engineer @ TES Global

See what I'm looking for next →

A Bit About Me

The Journey So Far

I started coding back in 2004 with simple HTML sites, and somehow ended up building systems that handle millions of users. Along the way, I've discovered that the best software isn't just about clever code - it's about solving real problems for real people. What teams tell me they value is that I take ownership, communicate honestly about tradeoffs, and stay with a system long enough to be accountable for it.

These days, I work mostly with TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Python, Docker and Kubernetes, across product code, data pipelines and infrastructure. I use modern AI-assisted development workflows where they improve delivery without compromising engineering quality, and I've also built LLM-backed product features - classification pipelines, alerting and search - as part of real systems.

From my own projects like MoaiTime (a productivity platform) and WeWentCarRacing (because I love motorsports), to work with companies like Philips, RWE, and Innogy, and a government smart-city platform - I enjoy building things!

What Drives Me

✓ Building things people love - There's nothing quite like seeing someone actually use and enjoy something you've built. That's what keeps me coding.
✓ Learning constantly - The tech world moves fast, and I love keeping up. Whether it's a new framework or an old problem with a fresh approach.
✓ Sharing knowledge - I write about my projects, contribute to open source, and enjoy helping other developers when I can.
✓ Ownership over tickets - I'd rather be accountable for a system end to end than hand work over the wall and hope it lands.
✓ Making things simple - The best software is invisible to the user. Complex problems shouldn't require complex interfaces.
✓ Integrity in communication - I say what I know, what I don't, and what I'm doing next, so the people I work with always have the full picture.

🇩🇪 Übrigens, ja, ich spreche natürlich auch Deutsch! Früher hatte ich eine deutsche Version dieser Webseite, aber oftmals habe ich die Texte vergessen zu übersetzen, deshalb halte ich es jetzt nur auf Englisch!

Read My Blog Employment & Career

Ways to work together

Two ways we can work together, both long-standing parts of how I work.

Join your engineering team

I'm open to Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer and hands-on Technical Lead opportunities where I can take meaningful ownership of products and systems over the long term.

Employment & Career →

Bring me in for a project

For independent software delivery, product development, modernization, automation or embedded engineering, I work through Corco Labs.

Visit Corco Labs →

Interested in working together?

I'm open to senior engineering opportunities and selected independent engagements.

Hiring for an engineering role, or working through a hard technical problem?

I respond within 24 hours
Straight answers about fit and tradeoffs
Technical concepts explained in plain English
Remote-first, based in Slovenia (EU)

Discuss a role Contact me

Looking for a software delivery partner? Visit Corco Labs.

Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer