Hello, I am a software development enthusiast based in Estonia.

Viljar Võidula

Engineering Leadership · Product Delivery · Platforms & AI

Engineering leader with experience as a team lead, staff engineer, interim CTO and founder in product companies. I develop engineers through coaching, feedback and real ownership, and stay responsible from problem definition through delivery and operations — scalable systems and AI products with measurable customer impact.

Enquire about a contract What I take on

viljar@5xer.com LinkedIn GitHubTallinn / Paide, Estonia

Now: founder & technical co-founder of Fivexer — and open to contract work alongside it.

Next: an engineering leadership role in a product company with an interesting problem to solve.

Selected impact

70×

Scale

Built Veriff’s task-assignment engine and helped scale it from 10,000 to 700,000+ sessions with sub-second distribution latency.

+140%

Operational efficiency

Raised the number of live QA tasks each specialist processed at Veriff by 140% year over year.

€2M+ projected savings over 5 years

+8%

Product results

Helped launch Miros’ AI search product, which beat Algolia in an A/B test and lifted conversion by approximately 8% for a customer with ~€100M in yearly revenue.

≈ €8M a year in added revenue

99.999%

Reliability and cost

Kept five-nines availability for major retail customers while cutting the product’s unit cost.

AWS bill cut 40×

€2.5M

Funding round

As interim CTO, led the investor technical due diligence behind a successful €2.5M round.

People and organisational leadership. Led and coached engineers at Veriff; set company-wide engineering priorities as interim CTO at Miros.
Data platform. Designed an Airbyte, Amazon RDS and BigQuery platform processing millions of events per hour.

Work with me

I take on contract and fractional work where engineering, product and the business meet — usually when a team needs someone to set direction, design the system and stay through delivery and operations.

Interim CTO & engineering leadership

Set priorities and ownership through a growth phase, and coach the team that carries it forward.

Architecture & platform

Distributed systems, GraphQL APIs, Kubernetes and AWS — designed to scale, observable and cost-aware.

Assignment & decisioning systems

Task-distribution, routing and matching engines that hold up at volume, with low latency and auditable decisions.

AI products & adoption

Find where LLM workflows actually pay off, build them with human review where mistakes are costly, and get the team using them.

Technical due diligence

The technical side of a funding round or acquisition — from either side of the table.

Engagement: Fractional or fixed project
Where: Remote from Estonia · on-site by arrangement
Availability: Open to new projects
Rates: €1,000/day · €125/hourHalf-day minimum · excl. VAT

Enquire about a contract Book a callEmail opens a short template — project, timeline, budget. Or pick a time in my calendar.

Experience

Technical Contractor / Consultant
VeriffTallinnOct 2025 – present
- Own modernisation of the reviewer task-distribution system, from discovery to rollout, improving reliability, maintainability and operational flow.
- Work with engineering and product to turn recurring operational problems into scoped, prioritised improvements.
- Build and review Node.js microservices and GraphQL integrations; improve operational data for prioritisation and production diagnosis.
Founder & Technical Co-Founder
Fivexerformerly Forgemaster AI · RemoteOct 2024 – present
- Led the pivot from a knowledge platform for code, documentation and AI assistants to an assignment engine for hybrid human and AI teams, based on customer discovery.
- Own product direction, architecture, full-stack delivery, LLM integrations, Kubernetes infrastructure and operations.
- Turn customer feedback into a prioritised roadmap; build rota planning, skills-based routing and auditable assignment decisions.
Interim CTO
MirosTallinnJan – Aug 2024
- Set engineering priorities and ownership during a growth phase, aligning technical and product decisions with company goals.
- Launched the AI e-commerce search platform that delivered approximately 8% higher conversion in a customer A/B test against Algolia.
- Balanced availability, performance and cloud costs; maintained 99.999% availability for major retail customers while reducing AWS spend.
- Led investor technical due diligence for a successful €2.5M funding round.
Staff Engineer
MirosEstoniaMar 2023 – Aug 2024
- Led the AWS migration and platform architecture for an AI product search engine running on Kubernetes.
- Refactored the backend behind a public GraphQL API, enabling product teams to deliver independently.
- Introduced OpenTelemetry observability, production metrics and shared on-call to improve operability.
- Designed an Airbyte, Amazon RDS and BigQuery data platform processing millions of events per hour.
Software Engineering Team Lead
VeriffTallinnJan 2022 – Jan 2023
- Led and developed engineers through 1:1s, direct feedback, mentoring, design reviews and delegated ownership.
- Built the task-assignment engine and helped scale distribution from 10,000 to 700,000+ sessions with sub-second latency.
- Designed a unified GraphQL gateway that decoupled neighbouring teams’ delivery; drove adoption of domain-driven design across engineering.

Earlier

Solutions Architect · Telia Eesti · 2019 – 2021: Led IoT architecture for Tartu SmartEnCity; designed, developed and maintained a service delivery orchestration platform for MPLS services, covering IPAM integration, configuration parsing and provisioning.
Founder · Testreel · 2014 – 2021: Built and led the company across hiring, delivery, sales, customer relationships and partnerships; delivered multimedia products and exited successfully in 2021.
Network administrator → QA engineer · Elion / Telia · 2011 – 2014: Tested Samsung and LG TV firmware and Telia’s TV application, and was Telia’s technical contact for both partners. The Samsung Smart TV app won the IFA 2012 Innovation award.

Skills

People: Team leadership, hiring, coaching, career development, performance management, direct feedback
Delivery: Roadmap execution, prioritisation, cross-functional alignment, code and design reviews, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, A/B testing
Backend & data: Node.js, TypeScript, distributed systems, microservices, API design, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, BigQuery, Airbyte
Cloud & operations: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Pulumi, on-call, incident response, cost optimisation
Observability: OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, Prometheus, Grafana, SigNoz, production metrics and alerting
AI: LLM applications and workflows, AI assistant integrations, MLOps, OpenAI, Anthropic, vector search

How I work

Clear context and ownership
Connect work to customer outcomes and delegate meaningful decisions.
As team lead at Veriff, I developed engineers through 1:1s, direct feedback, design reviews and delegated ownership.
Practical execution
Make trade-offs visible, plan realistic increments and surface risks early.
As interim CTO at Miros, I set priorities and ownership through a growth phase while we launched AI search.
Continuous improvement
Use feedback, design reviews and incident follow-up to improve systems.
As staff engineer at Miros, I introduced OpenTelemetry, production metrics and shared on-call.

Earlier projects

Forgemaster

2024 – now · Founder · GitHub analytics, AI

Engineering visibility for founders, CTOs and investors: connect GitHub to see delivery confidence, ownership gaps and burnout signals — built for technical due diligence too.

Visit forgemaster.ai

Westbygg

2021 – now · Next.js, Feathers.js

Website for a central-Estonian maker of handmade log cabins, built with traditional manual methods.

Gamestreams

2016 – 2019 · React, LG webOS

E-sports streams for LG TVs. Over 10k downloads a month and top-3 rated in every region, until Twitch shipped its own app.

Telia MinuTV

2014 – 2016 · QA · Nightwatch, Appium

Telia Estonia’s first OTT app for web and mobile; I led QA and test automation. Around 50k subscribers.

Press: MinuTV for iPhone (in Estonian)

Telia Connected TV

2012 – 2015 · QA · Samsung Smart TV

The Samsung Smart TV app that won the IFA 2012 Innovation award, TV category.

Press: world-first set-top-box-free TV (in Estonian)

Simote

2013 – 2014 · Requirements · acceptance testing

IR-blaster platform that recorded user behaviour and replayed it across TV and set-top box hardware.

Speaking

Video: Don’t Panic!, Claude Code Meetup Tallinn

Don’t Panic!Claude Code Meetup Tallinn · Early 2026An intro to AI coding agents for teams stuck with GitHub Copilot: what changes, where to start and what to watch out for.Watch on YouTube

Personal

Education: Computer Technology / Computer Systems TechnologyKehtna School of Economics and Technology, 2006 – 2010Finance & Financial Management ServicesEstonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences, since 2015
Languages: Estonian (native) · English (proficient) · German (low proficiency)
Interests: Licensed private pilot, PPL(A) — checklists and decisions under pressure. Snowboarding for 18 years. Helped build the handmade log house that is home.
References: See LinkedIn recommendations; direct references from managers, founders, partners and engineers on request.