Borut Balazek
Borut Balazek
Hi there, I'm
Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer

Full-Stack · Backend · Data · Cloud · 14+ years
Eight years from first developer to millions of users, through the acquisition.
I joined ClassCharts alongside the CTO when it served a few dozen schools, and left it serving thousands of schools across the UK education system. The work since has been data-heavy: 100+ API endpoints, Airflow pipelines over filings and market data, LLM classification in production.
Available now for one long-term senior seat - Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer or hands-on Technical Lead - as an employee or a B2B contractor, remote-first on CET.
My own product work continues in my own time, or pauses, whichever the role needs.
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.

What I'm doing now

As of September 2026

Since my MarketAlerts engagement ended in March 2026 I have split my time between client engineering and building my own products, on tooling that lets one engineer ship several things at once.

  • Client engineering, under NDA

    March to June 2026: backend work for an EdTech startup on an AI tutoring platform used by millions of students. Consolidated billing and usage metering onto one model across every tier, and built the memory extraction and nightly reconciliation pipeline behind it.

    See the write-up →

  • Guestavo

    Guest-engagement platform for hospitality venues: reservations, menus, events, loyalty and a guest portal. Live in beta, built solo.

    guestavo.com →

  • AfterGather

    Media hub for photographers: private client galleries plus QR-based guest uploads at live events. Early access, built solo.

    aftergather.com →

  • A third product

    Pre-launch and not public yet, built with a co-founder. Details when it launches.

  • The agent tooling behind all of it

    180 workflow definitions with a gate and a model tier per phase, MCP servers that let coding agents read and write real project state, and a hard rule that nothing public ships without a human.

    Read how it works →

Available now for a long-term senior seat. Product work continues in my own time, or pauses, whichever the role needs.

Selected Engineering Experience

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

Edukey Education / TES Global

Senior Software Engineer

Joined as the first developer alongside the CTO and stayed 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. The scope moved with it: building the product, then rebuilding the web app from jQuery to React in place, then the three mobile apps in React Native, then the infrastructure through Rackspace, GCP and AWS, then onboarding the teams that arrived with the acquisition.

Read the case study →
2015 - 2023

MarketAlerts

Founding Engineer

Founding engineer and CTO, hands-on throughout, on an AI-powered investment intelligence platform covering 20+ global markets: web app, mobile app, CMS, data platform and infrastructure. The company wound down in March 2026.

Read the case study →
2024 - 2026

Corco Labs

Founder & Senior Software Engineer

Founded in 2012 (previously Corcosoft), now an independent studio. My long-term engagements, including Edukey and MarketAlerts above, are invoiced through it, alongside around 70 client projects: full-stack products, internal tools, configurators, booking systems and campaign platforms.

Visit Corco Labs →
2012 - Present
Full experience and outcomes View All Case Studies

Featured Projects

Things I've built outside client work - two products live in 2026, data-heavy systems and open source - where I owned the architecture as well as the code.

AfterGather

A media hub for photographers that fuses two workflows usually split across separate tools: private client galleries with proofing, and QR-based guest photo uploads at live events. A Next.js app, a Fastify API with TypeBox schemas, a BullMQ worker, PostgreSQL via Drizzle and S3-compatible storage, plus billing, web push and GDPR export. Live in early access, built solo in 2026.

TypescriptNext.jsFastifyPostgreSQLBullMQStripe
Website →

Guestavo

A guest-engagement platform for independent hospitality venues: reservations, digital menus, events, campaigns, messaging, loyalty and a guest portal that closes the loop after a visit. A Next.js operator app and public property pages, a Fastify API, a BullMQ worker and PostgreSQL via Drizzle, with a multi-domain, locale-per-domain architecture. Live in beta, built solo in 2026.

TypescriptNext.jsFastifyPostgreSQLRedisBullMQ
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 →

🎮 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. Ten of the thirteen are from the Edukey Education and TES Global years, so they cover the same engagement from five different seats.
" 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 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
See what I'm looking for next →

A Bit About Me

The journey so far

I started coding in 2004 with plain HTML sites. The work that shaped me most was eight years inside one EdTech product, ClassCharts: from the first developer hire to a platform on millions of users, through a jQuery-to-React rewrite, a React Native mobile rebuild and three cloud migrations. What teams say 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 in TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL and Python on Docker and Kubernetes, across product code, data pipelines and infrastructure. I have shipped LLM-backed features in production - classification pipelines, alerting and search - and I direct AI coding agents through workflows I built myself, with verification gates so the speed does not cost quality.

Outside work: motorsport (hence WeWentCarRacing), DJing, and the occasional contribution to a 3D engine.

How I work

  • ✓ Ownership over tickets - I'd rather be accountable for a system end to end than hand work over the wall and hope it lands.
  • ✓ Long horizons - I stayed eight years on one product and two on the next. I'd rather stay and be accountable than rotate.
  • ✓ 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

One seat, two contract forms

I take one long-term senior engagement at a time. How it is papered is your call, and both are how I have always worked.

Hire me as an employee

Senior Software Engineer, Staff Engineer or hands-on Technical Lead, with real ownership of a product or system. EU employment contract, remote-first.

Employment & Career →

Bring me in as a contractor

Same seat, same commitment, invoiced through Corco Labs d.o.o. This is how the Edukey engagement and the MarketAlerts founding role ran, and the simplest route for companies outside the EU.

Corco Labs →

Interested in working together?

Available now for a long-term senior seat, as an employee or a B2B contractor.

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

  • I respond within 24 hours
  • Straight answers about fit and tradeoffs
  • Remote-first on CET. Full-day overlap with UK and EU teams, mornings with the US East Coast
  • Employment contract in the EU, or B2B through Corco Labs d.o.o.
Discuss a role Contact me

Contract work is invoiced through Corco Labs, an independent software studio.

Borut Balazek

Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer

Get in touch
Download CV Career