# Viljar Võidula

> Engineering Leadership · Product Delivery · Platforms & AI, based in Tallinn / Paide, Estonia. Available for contract and fractional work. 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.

Name spelling: Viljar Võidula (ASCII: Viljar Voidula). Website: https://viltz.ee/

## Contact

- Email: viljar@5xer.com
- Book a call: https://calendar.app.google/STKRNYDh7Mz8YtNWA
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/viljar-voidula
- GitHub: https://github.com/ViljarVoidula

## 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/hour (Half-day minimum · excl. VAT)

## 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.

## Experience

### Technical Contractor / Consultant — Veriff

Oct 2025 – present · Tallinn

- 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 — Fivexer

Oct 2024 – present · formerly Forgemaster AI · Remote

- 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 — Miros

Jan – Aug 2024 · Tallinn

- 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 — Miros

Mar 2023 – Aug 2024 · Estonia

- 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 — Veriff

Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 · Tallinn

- 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](https://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)](https://www.am.ee/en/node/2244)
- **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)](https://forte.delfi.ee/artikkel/65370010/elion-ja-samsung-toid-maailmas-esimesena-turule-digiboksivaba-tv-teenuse-smart-tv-des)
- **Simote** (2013 – 2014; Requirements · acceptance testing): IR-blaster platform that recorded user behaviour and replayed it across TV and set-top box hardware.

## Speaking

- [Don’t Panic!](https://youtu.be/eLcrLkdgcDE) — Claude Code Meetup Tallinn, Early 2026. An intro to AI coding agents for teams stuck with GitHub Copilot: what changes, where to start and what to watch out for.

## Education

- Computer Technology / Computer Systems Technology — Kehtna School of Economics and Technology, 2006 – 2010
- Finance & Financial Management Services — Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences, since 2015

## Personal

- Languages: Estonian (native), English (proficient), German (low proficiency)
- Licensed private pilot, PPL(A). Snowboarding for 18 years. Helped build the handmade log house that is home.
- Books: The Emperor’s Handbook (Marcus Aurelius); The Pragmatic Programmer (David Thomas & Andrew Hunt); The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton M. Christensen); The Mythical Man-Month (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.); Brave New World (Aldous Huxley); Steppenwolf (Hermann Hesse); The Foundation series (Isaac Asimov); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche); The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman); The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith); 1984 (George Orwell); Animal Farm (George Orwell)