Reza Lavarian

Notes on software, systems, and experiments.

Selected work across marketing, sales, media, operations, and data.

About

Former founder/CTO and longtime product engineer. I’m a technical generalist who’s spent 20+ years building software from the first rough idea through product decisions, architecture, shipping, and growth. These days, I mostly experiment, build, and follow interesting problems wherever they lead.

I start with the outcome, look for the smallest useful change, and let complexity earn its place through real use. I’m at my best when the problem is clear but the path is not. A lot of speed comes from deciding what not to build. I repurpose existing systems beyond their original purpose when that solves the problem faster and keeps the solution easy to change.

I treat agentic development as more than a productivity tool. Because generated output is probabilistic, I don’t rely on prompts or rules files alone; correctness comes from explicit acceptance criteria, deterministic checks, tests, evaluation, and human review.

Work

Systems, data, and automation.

01

AI & data systems

Semantic search, computer vision, AI-assisted workflows, data processing, geospatial analysis, and evaluation.

02

Marketing performance, sales & automation

CRO, growth experiments, CRM, lead routing, enrichment, customer win-back, publishing, and reporting.

03

Creative & media production systems

Product content, automated video, distributed rendering, and controlled workflows for generative media.

Projects

Selected work.

Writing & open source

3M+ installations across two open source projects.

Crunz: PHP task scheduler. 1,400+ GitHub stars; 1.7M+ installations.

Laravel Menu: Laravel menu builder. 1,200+ GitHub stars; 1.5M+ installations.

Published technical writing in dev.to, SitePoint, Built In, Hashnode, and freeCodeCamp on software engineering, browser internals, and application development.

Experience

Product and technology work.

Independent Product & Technology Work

2025 – Present · Product Engineer / Advisor · Lisbon, Portugal · Nordhealth and Cavago

  • Advise founders and engineering leaders on product, architecture, and engineering effectiveness.
  • Built an AI publishing workflow that grew a blog from zero to ~4,000 daily unique visitors in ~6 months.
  • Build AI agents and automations with structured outputs, deterministic checks, tests, and human review.

discovermarket: Director of Engineering & Architecture

Nov 2023 – Jan 2025 · Swiss insuretech company · Lisbon, Portugal

  • Built and led the Lisbon engineering team while staying hands-on with architecture, prototypes, and delivery.
  • Led infrastructure cost optimisation, reducing cloud costs by approximately 50%.
  • Prototyped and led development of a B2B analytics platform and data pipeline.
  • Worked on GDPR and Asian PDP compliance for personal data at rest and in transit.

Comparamais: Co-founder & CTO

Jan 2019 – Nov 2023 · Lending and energy comparison platform · Lisbon, Portugal

  • Led technology from founding through acquisition by Lendo AB, then spent two years integrating with the Swedish team.
  • Built the MVP and core platform spanning search, leads, CRM integrations, crawlers, tools, and analytics; reaching ~120k monthly unique visitors in Portugal.
  • Led a cross-functional team of 10, including five technical staff, while staying hands-on across product and engineering.
  • Introduced an event/data layer and Amplitude funnel analysis, using experiments to raise a key funnel’s conversion to ~25% and sustain it across releases.
  • Led technical SEO across page speed, CWV, site architecture, and competitor analysis.
Selected projects

Volt: A product and engineering system that measures progress by business-gap closure, not task completion. Connects gaps to hypotheses, work, and observed results.

WildfireOS.org: Personal non-profit work using satellite and environmental data for wildfire monitoring, prediction, and treatment planning in Portugal and the Mediterranean.

AI Search & Computer Vision: Semantic and image-search prototypes using Qdrant, Typesense, and computer-vision pipelines.

Earlier experience

trivago: Software Engineer

May 2018 – Jan 2019 · Dusseldorf, Germany

Built a financial-data pipeline that consolidated records from multiple sources into a ledger, reducing days of error-prone manual processing to seconds, in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX).

iMoney Group: Software Engineer

Sep 2014 – Mar 2018 · Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Worked on the regional platform across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Built scheduling and sales-support systems for outbound operations; related work later contributed to Crunz.

Independent Software Consulting

2005 – Jul 2014 · Software Engineer / Consultant

Designed and developed web applications for organizations and private companies.

Capabilities & tools

Engineering leadership: team building, hiring, mentoring, engineering effectiveness, delivery, distributed teams, technical strategy

Architecture & SaaS: cloud-native systems, APIs/integrations, data platforms, distributed systems, reliability, scalability, AWS, GCP, Docker, Linux

AI-native engineering: Claude Code/Codex, LLM applications, agents, structured outputs, deterministic validation, evaluation, RAG, computer vision

Product & delivery: product discovery, sequencing, MVPs, experimentation, analytics, CRO, technical SEO

Technologies: Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP/Laravel, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, React, Vue, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Qdrant, Typesense, Airflow, Temporal, n8n