• 🇷🇴 I was born in Romania and my father purchased our first computer (for the house) while I was still in kindergarten.
• 🐣 When I was 9 years old, I signed up to a Computer Science club, hoping to play games. Instead, I learned how to code in QBasic.
• 👩‍🏫 When I turned 15, my teacher took a special interest in me and showed me the basics of competitive programming in Pascal (like LeetCode, Topcoder, Codeforces, but before these platforms existed)
• 📈 I spent my high school years skipping classes to learn algorithms and data structures and competed against other students all over the country
• 👩‍🏫 At 18, I started a local meetup to discuss algorithms with other students. About 15 students enrolled for an entire year.
• 🥇 After finding out that in C++ you don't need to hand write your hash maps from scratch (like in Pascal), I spent 3 weeks learning C++ from zero, then used it to win my first gold medal in the National Olympiad in Informatics.
• 🇬🇧 At 19, I left my friends and family behind and moved to London, United Kingdom to study Computing at Imperial College London. Imperial College accepted me based on an interview that I attended in person. The interview problem was a Dynamic Programming classic that I just happened to teach to my students two weeks prior.
• 💰 Money was tight and my plan was to get a summer internship and use the 3 months of salary in the summer to cover my following 9 months of expenses. My dance partner's husband worked at Google and, through his referral, I had my first ever job interview (with Google), which I failed.
• 📉 50+ interviews and 8 months later and I finally landed a summer internship with a gambling company near Holborn station (London). Outside university and competitive programming, I had 0 real-world experience with software, it was my first job ever and my colleagues were very kind and patient with me. They ended up liking me, gave me an end-of-the-internship bonus and a return offer, but I declined because I wanted to keep experimenting. Instead, I baked pancakes for every person in the office.
• 👨‍💻 During my 2nd year, Microsoft came on campus and hosted interviews. It was first-come-first-served and I secured an 8 am slot that nobody wanted. I realized that all of my colleagues would talk about their Imperial College coursework in compilers and operating systems and that the poor interviewer probably hears the exact same story from 16 back-to-back interviews. I decided instead to talk about a Laravel (PHP) project that I was building for a client. The interviewer must have loved that because I got invited to Copenhagen for the final round
• 🇩🇰 On my way to Copenhagen I stumbled upon a book called "Cracking the coding interview". I read it in the day before the intereview and it completely changed the way I approached interviews. For the first time in my life, I absolutely rocked them. I was supposed to have 4 interviews, but the fourth interviewer told me that I already passed and his role was just to convince me to accept the offer. I signed on the spot.
• 🇺🇸 I spent the summer in Seattle (USA) and fell in love with the country. My new goal was to move there after I graduate. I returned one year later for another internship with Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto, California. And again a year after for a stint with Jump Trading in Chicago.
• 🌴 I was not able to secure a more permanent work visa for the United States, so I returned to the UK and later to Romania. During this time, I worked in High Frequency Trading, I co-founded a startup, I closed it when it failed, I backpacked around South America, and started an outsourcing business which was quite successful.
•  At some point, I received a work visa for the United States and a job offer for Apple and moved to California. The position was a good fit and I quickly grew in my role, launched five major projects and received two promotions.
• 👨‍💻 My main interest these days is Machine Learning Infrastructure.

• I was the top contributor of palantir/plottable in 2015.
• I designed and implemented FredHutch/motuz in 2019.

• https://andrei.cioara.me/ - Personal Website
• https://wa.hatching.xyz/ - A tool that allows users to send WhatsApp messages to numbers outside contact list
• https://scratchmap.hatching.xyz/ - Digital World Scratch Map
• https://andrei.cioara.me/relax/ - Deep breath exercises
• https://github.com/aicioara/til - A collection of "Today I Learned" snippets

• https://github.com/aicioara/settings
• https://github.com/aicioara/dotfiles
• https://github.com/aicioara/competitive-programming

StackOverflow | LeetCode

• The easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn.
• The best way to reach me is email. The address is 2 clicks away.