Florian-Leonard Gozman

Principal Software Engineer · Software Architect

I still ship backend code, and some of it has been running in production for more than a decade. Twenty-five years building systems, the last twenty leading their design.

About

I started writing software in 2000 and never stopped. Most of that time I have spent as a hands-on architect: I set the technical direction, and I still write the backend code that runs underneath it. The part I am proudest of is not a single launch but longevity. Several systems I designed years ago are still in production and still being maintained. Making something that survives a decade of real use is harder than making something that demos well. Across these years I have architected and shipped more than 25 business systems for clients in Europe and Asia; the three below are the ones I find most worth talking about.

My background is split between engineering and mathematics. I took a full mathematics degree in parallel with my engineering work and spent two years as a research assistant in numerical and statistical calculus. That math habit shows up in how I think about systems: where the real constraints are, and which abstraction is worth its cost. I have a long-standing interest in AI and machine learning, studied through Stanford and DeepLearning.AI coursework, and I have put LLMs to work in production where they actually paid off.

Selected work

Three of the 25+ systems I've shipped, chosen because they're still in production and worth talking about.

Zoniz

Architect & backend lead · in production since 2013

Zoniz began in 2013 as a beacon and proximity-engagement platform for municipalities, malls, expo centres and festivals, and later grew into a full restaurant product with QR menus, table ordering, online payments, a waiter app and kitchen displays. It powered the UNTOLD and Electric Castle festivals, ran Romania's first mall deployment with beacons (a EUR 1.5M proximity-marketing project at AFI Palace Cotroceni), and in a pilot at the District of Toast restaurant in Cluj-Napoca it doubled orders and revenue. More than 100 client projects have shipped on the platform.

I designed and built the backend: the core services, the payment, email and job-scheduling integrations, and the OpenAI content layer that generates and adapts product copy for clients.

What I'd highlight: the OpenAI layer is the part of my work closest to "AI in production." It is integration rather than model-building, but it is real: it runs against live client data, has to fail gracefully when the model misbehaves, and had to earn its place against a much simpler templated approach.
Stack: Java, Spring, Tomcat, MongoDB, MySQL, OpenAI, ReactJS, NodeJS, AWS S3 & EC2, Android, iOS, Beacons, Stripe, SendGrid, Quartz

Sosito

Architect & backend lead · in production since 2020

Paper timesheets are slow and easy to fake. With Sosito, employees clock in by tapping an NFC tag with their own phone: it keeps working offline, shows who is on site right now across multiple locations, and produces payroll and labour-inspectorate (ITM) reports in one click. It currently tracks more than 600 employees and over 5,000 clock-ins a month.

I designed and built the backend web services and the SMS and email notification flows. The interesting constraint here was offline-first behaviour: a clock-in cannot be lost just because a phone has no signal in a basement or on a factory floor, so the system has to reconcile cleanly when connectivity returns.

What I'd highlight: the hard part of attendance software is not the happy path, it is trust. Reports go to payroll and to government inspectors, so the data has to be defensible. Most of the design effort went into making the record accurate and tamper-evident rather than into new features.
Stack: Kotlin, Spring Boot, MongoDB, Swagger, ReactJS, AWS EC2, Android, iOS, NFC, Twilio SMS, SendGrid

CrossA

Architect & backend lead · in production since 2021 · EU-cofinanced R&D

CrossA is a configurable community-management platform for clusters, sports bodies, volunteer organizations, research centres and social associations. It handles hierarchical organizations, a drag-and-drop form builder, member subscriptions and payments, and was built as an EU-cofinanced research and development project.

I designed and built the backend services and the identity and single-sign-on layer. The challenge was generality without chaos: every client wants a slightly different structure, so the model had to be flexible enough to fit very different organizations while staying coherent enough to maintain and reason about.

What I'd highlight: "highly customizable" is where a lot of platforms quietly turn into unmaintainable spaghetti. Getting the configuration model right early, deciding what flexes and what stays fixed, is what determined whether this stayed buildable.
Stack: Java, Spring Boot, MongoDB, Swagger, ReactJS, AWS EC2, Keycloak, SendGrid
Earlier work A key part of IBM Rational Publishing Engine, used by IBM's largest customers; an environmental-law SaaS for Ragn-Sells (2,300 staff across six countries); and the Swedish Swimming Federation's central database, holding results for 100+ clubs and more than two million swims.

Beyond code

I like working at the seam between engineering and the people who use what I build. Two decades of clients and teams across Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, Spain and the UK taught me as much about communicating a design as about making one, and I have come to value that side of the work nearly as much as the code itself. The mathematics I studied alongside engineering is part of how I think: I tend to reach for the underlying structure of a problem before reaching for a framework, and I enjoy the moment when a messy requirement reveals a clean shape underneath.

Maths + Engineering
Full mathematics degree taken alongside computer engineering
Ph.D. research
Numerical & Statistical Calculus, Babeș-Bolyai University
Valedictorian
High-school class valedictorian
5 countries
Two decades of clients and teams across Europe and Asia