Curriculum Vitae

Ciprian (Chip) Rarau

I find a real problem, build the system that solves it, and scale it until it runs without me. The product changes; the instinct doesn't.

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chip@ideaplaces.comciprianrarau.comgithub.com/crarauLinkedIn

Experience

2025 — Now

Founder · IdeaPlaces

Montreal, Canada

•Active product portfolio: C3, monday2github, Style Guide, ImpactPulse, HireScout, WealthPlan.
•Shared DevOps repo, Azure Container Apps, encrypted Key Vault secrets, CI/CD from commit one.
•Open-source: C3 runs autonomous Claude Code agents triggered from Slack and Discord.

2025 — Now

CTO / CPO · Mentorly

Montreal, Canada

•AI mentorship platform with LLM-powered mentor matching at scale.
•Building technical and product organisation end to end.

2025 — Now

Technical Advisor · Eli Health

Montreal, Canada

•Telehealth and AI clinical decision support.
•Cross-region BigQuery + Datastream CDC, GA4 streaming, regulated data infrastructure.

2016 — 2025

CTO / CPO, Co-Founder · WISK.ai

Montreal, Canada

•Food and beverage intelligence for restaurants. Scaled from zero to 1000+ paying clients.
•Multi-million dollar revenue. Raised capital, built the team, owned production for nearly a decade.
•Architected the data pipeline that processes millions of inventory transactions.

2024 — Now

Founder · CatalyzeUP

Remote

•Startup infrastructure services. Production-grade infra, CI/CD, monitoring from day one.

2024 — Now

Co-Founder · WeHappers

Remote

•Non-profit. Wealth redistribution and global happiness through technology.

2021 — 2024

CTO Advisor · XpertSea, Alveole, and others

Multiple

•Architecture, React Native, AWS, Python.
•Each engagement widened the lens that powers the IdeaPlaces portfolio today.

2015 — 2016

Head of Mobile · Eastern Bank

Boston, USA

•Mobile banking. PWC-approved security audit. Enterprise-grade compliance.

2012 — 2014

VP Engineering, 1st Employee · OMsignal

Montreal, Canada

•Bio-sensing wearables. Raised $10M+. Acquired by Honeywell.
•Built the engineering organisation from one person.

2014 — 2016

Founder · IdeaPlaces (v1)

Montreal, Canada

•Location-based notes. 25,000+ downloads. Evernote and Dropbox integration.

Areas of expertise

Architecture & Infrastructure

•Multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP)
•Containers, Kubernetes, Container Apps
•Terraform, IaC, GitHub Actions
•BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Datastream CDC
•Production monitoring and observability

Product & Engineering

•Full-stack: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node, Python
•Mobile: React Native, native iOS/Android
•AI tooling: Claude Code, LLM apps, RAG, MCP
•Data pipelines and analytics
•Spec-driven development with AI

Leadership

•Hiring and growing engineering teams from zero
•Fundraising (raised over $10M cumulative)
•Partnership with sales, product, and operations
•Crisis response and incident management
•Stakeholder communication at the board level

Education

1998 — 2003

Computer Science

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Romania