Simon Gjetaj

My work starts where the playbook ends: no codebase, no team, just an idea that needs to become a company. In 9 years across startups, scaleups, and established companies, I’ve seen how software gets built at every stage, and learned I’m at my best at the very start, owning the journey end to end. Technical vision, architecture, the first thousand decisions, at times as the sole engineer. Then the hiring, from first interview to final call, and mentoring engineers until they own their domains outright. The track record: an engineering foundation built from zero through to Series A readiness - product, infrastructure, and team. Before that: 4 startups launched in 12 months with a team of two; end-to-end engineering for Klink, which went on to become a leading crypto rewards platform; and one critical defect caught in a live credit system at a Telepass Group company. I came up before the AI wave. I've built products and led teams both ways: without AI and with it. The hard part was never adopting the tools; it's knowing which parts of engineering to hand over, and which ones you still have to own. I grew up in the mountains of Mirdita, Albania - I’ve never trusted a path that doesn’t climb.