Hi there, I'm

Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer

Full-Stack · Backend · Data · Cloud

Eight years took one EdTech product from tens of thousands to millions of users, then LLM pipelines in production.

Available now for a long-term senior seat: Senior Software Engineer, Senior Product Engineer or hands-on Technical Lead. Remote-first from Slovenia on CET.

View Experience Download CV

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

Selected Engineering Experience

Long-running engagements building and scaling software, owning infrastructure, and mentoring fellow engineers.

Edukey Education / TES Global

Senior Software Engineer - contract via Corco Labs

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.

Thousands of UK schools
40+ TB migrated between clouds
Six store listings, ~2M downloads

Read the case study →

2015 - 2023

MarketAlerts

Founding Engineer - contract via Corco Labs

Took over an agency-built investment-intelligence platform covering 20+ global markets. Worked hands-on across the application, AI layer and infrastructure, alongside colleagues in frontend, backend/data APIs, design and marketing. The company wound down in March 2026.

20+ global markets
Web, iOS, Android and the API
Largest contributor to the codebase

Read the case study →

2024 - 2026

Corco Labs

Independent Software Consultant

The consultancy I ran from 2012 - as Corcosoft, a sole proprietorship, until it was incorporated as Corco Labs d.o.o. in 2025. Edukey, MarketAlerts and the smart-city work were all delivered through it as long-term contracts, along with freelance and shorter client work - around 70 projects: full-stack products, internal tools, configurators, booking systems and campaign platforms.

~70 projects delivered
Philips, RWE, Innogy, Red Bull
Campaigns renewed six to seven seasons

Visit Corco Labs →

2012 - 2026

Full experience and outcomes View All Case Studies

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 8 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

" 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

" 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

" Hey Borut, just a quick one to say thank you for everything. You're one hell of a developer and honestly I don't think we'd be where we are without you. "

David Williams Product Manager @ Edukey Education Ltd

" It was a pleasure working with you and we are definitely going to miss the speed with which you complete tasks. You are one of the fastest developers I have ever worked with! "

Tomislav Knezevic Lead Frontend Engineer @ Martian

" At this point I have to draw my breath, because Borut is amazing and I have worked with him for more than half a decade, he is simply dynamite! "

Steve Murphy QA Engineer @ TES Global

" It's been fantastic working with you. You are so talented and nothing is ever any trouble. Unfortunately, because you are so brilliant, I now have high expectations! "

Grace Evans Project Manager @ Edukey Education Ltd

" It was great collaborating with Borut. He consistently delivers high-quality work, is quick to respond and available when needed, and is always willing to help teammates find the best solution. "

Alexander Sijan Frontend Engineer @ Martian

" Finally I can confirm from my personal experience that Borut has been an indispensable enabler for the QA team. He has worked with me and my colleague to develop and maintain the automated test environments including the Cypress infrastructure. "

Russell Scott QA Engineer @ TES Global

" Borut has been an irreplaceable member of the team and an undervalued asset to the business. He definitely deserves recognition for all of his hard work. "

John Beer System Operations Manager @ Edukey Education Ltd

" He has been a vital member of the team during difficult times. Borut is always approachable, willing to listen and collaborate on solving problems. "

Jamie Beer System Operations Manager @ Edukey Education Ltd

See what I'm looking for next →

What I'm doing now

As of September 2026

Since my MarketAlerts engagement ended in March 2026 I have been building software products and AI-assisted engineering tooling. I am available now for a full-time, long-term remote engineering role, through employment or B2B.

Guestavo

A guest-engagement platform for independent hospitality venues, replacing the patchwork of reservation widgets, menu PDFs, mailing tools and paper loyalty cards most of them juggle. I chose the domain, designed the product and built all of it: multi-tenant operator app, public property pages, API, background workers and the guest portal that closes the loop after a visit. Live in beta.

guestavo.com →

AfterGather

Media hub for photographers: private client galleries plus QR-based guest uploads at live events. Active project with access through a public waitlist.
aftergather.com →

How I build with AI agents

I work with coding agents every day, and the part that matters is the harness around them rather than the prompting. Versioned workflow definitions with a gate and a model tier per phase, MCP servers that let agents read and write real project state instead of guessing at it, and a hard rule that nothing public ships without a human reviewing it. Guestavo and AfterGather were both built on tooling I wrote myself.

Read how it works →

Featured Projects

Beyond the products above: data and pipeline work, desktop and productivity apps, and open source - all outside client work, all where I owned the architecture as well as the code.

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 long-running personal platform for aggregating, classifying, and indexing financial news and market data - perpetual work rather than a project with an end date, still being extended. The system processes around 100,000 articles daily using a microservices architecture with specialized data stores - Clickhouse for analytics, Meilisearch for search, Qdrant for vector search, and Redis for caching - with event-driven processing via BullMQ handling the article pipeline, and self-hosted models for embeddings, clustering, NER, sentiment and language detection.

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

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 at one company and two at 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, Senior Product 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 as a contract. This is how the Edukey engagement and the MarketAlerts founding role ran, and the simplest route for companies that cannot hire an EU employee.

Talk about a contract →

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
Based in Ljutomer, Slovenia, remote-first on CET. Full-day overlap with UK and EU teams, mornings with the US East Coast
Employment contract in the EU, or a B2B contract from outside it

Discuss a role Contact me

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

Borut Balazek

Senior Software Engineer