Meet Team Mochila: Cosmin Rusu, VP of Software Engineering

Meet Team Mochila

Cosmin Rusu

VP of Software Engineering, Romania

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Start date‍‍

November 2019. Following my time at university and after completing my graduate work in data science, I secured and gained experience through a number of interesting roles at large tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple, which provided an excellent training ground for my current role at Mochila.

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Hometown‍

I'm originally from a small town in Romania called Beclean, with a population of around 10,000 people. My graduate work studying data science at Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) took me to Switzerland, and following that, my time working in Big Tech allowed me the opportunity to explore the Bay Area and other parts of the US. I’ve since made my way back home, though, and am once again based in Romania, now in Cluj (which happens to be the second most populous city in Romania, so a bit larger than my hometown).

First (or worst) job ‍

In high school, my first job was teaching computer science to kids. I really enjoyed it, so much so that I continued to do it on the side even after I received my first "real" job offer some time down the road.

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Favorite sports team(s)‍

The Spanish soccer team Barcelona FC. I really enjoyed playing and watching soccer growing up, and Barcelona FC was one of the best when I was a kid. Best team, best players - first they had Ronaldinho, and then later my favorite player Lionel Messi (now playing in the US with Inter Miami).‍

Hidden talent‍

I am pretty handy around the house and have undertaken several DIY home improvement projects lately; this includes recently installing motion-activated LED lights throughout my house.

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‍Guilty pleasure‍

Turning all of my travels into mini regional food and wine tasting adventures. Every time I travel I try to sample (and sometimes learn to cook!) the local dishes and taste wine and other local drink specialties. Some of my favorite travel locations for food and wine tasting recently have included - probably not surprisingly - Palermo, in Southern Italy, as well as a few areas around Rome and Milan.

Favorite kind of logistics project or problem

I've always enjoyed solving math and physics problems, and I first started coding (using C++ and C#) in high school. I consider myself a generalist, and have always enjoyed learning about lists, graphs theory, developing websites, and working with databases. 

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At Mochila, I've particularly enjoyed the opportunity to apply those passions to work on dynamic, real-time optimizations to choose the lowest-cost way to ship packages to customers: choosing the optimal fulfillment center, finding the optimal shipping box, and choosing the best carrier and ship method - all subject to different constraints depending on the particular client and the particular attributes of the order (e.g. first-time customer, high-value order, etc.)

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I've also found it both fun and extremely gratifying to work on systems architecture and infrastructure problems that enable these optimizations to run reliably and efficiently. As examples of this, I've enjoyed leading Mochila's transition to Google Cloud and the implementation of Kubernetes which have both helped to support the scaling of Mochila's fulfillment network to over five fulfillment centers, processing millions of packages.

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Overall, it brings me a lot of satisfaction to see my code being used every day to help create an amazing customer experience for the end-user.

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