Independent software architect
GraphQL and Go systems, AI-built codebases and regulated platforms, designed and reviewed by an architect with two decades in production.
I am Dan Podina, a software architect with twenty years in production systems and a specialization in GraphQL and Go. I work independently through GQLTeam SRL in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, with clients across Europe and the United States, mostly in healthcare, fintech, insurance and SaaS.
Two things changed in 2026. Teams now build entire products with AI coding tools in weeks, and then need someone to confirm the result can carry hiring, funding and traffic. And teams are putting agents into production, which turns tool boundaries, evaluations and guardrails into architecture problems. Both are the discipline I have practised for two decades, applied to a new situation.
I also build and run things: SystemTrails, a productized review practice for AI-built products; Labra, an open-source Go and GraphQL platform; and Sabra, a club management product built on it. This site publishes its content for people and for AI agents alike: every page has a Markdown version, the site has an llms.txt, and a public MCP server exposes the same facts to any agent that asks.
Seven ways to work with me, grouped by what you need. Every engagement starts with a free discovery call and a written scope.
Built with AI?
SystemTrails reviews AI-built products and returns a written verdict in three days. When the fixes need an architect in the room, the engagement continues here.
Two projects that show how I think. The metrics are from the systems themselves.
LabraGo is an open-source enterprise headless CMS built with Go and GraphQL. Designed for extensibility, multi-tenancy, and developer productivity.
Clinical trial management system for U.S. laboratories built on Go and GraphQL. 21 CFR Part 11 compliant with full audit trail support.
What clients said, with the year and the engagement.
“We had 7 legacy systems with no good way to unify them. Dan architected a federated GraphQL gateway that wrapped everything without touching the underlying systems. Response times went from 8 seconds to 400ms. He saved us from a multi-million dollar rewrite.”
“Working with Dan was a game-changer for our startup. He helped us design a GraphQL API that reduced our mobile app's API calls by 80%. What I valued most was how he explained the why behind every decision. Six months later, our team still references his architecture diagrams.”
“Migrating 2 million patient records with zero downtime sounded impossible. Dan's strangler pattern approach de-risked the entire project. We ran old and new systems in parallel for 3 months, gradually shifted traffic, and never had a single outage. The migration plan he created was our blueprint.”
The brand family. Each one is a running system, not a landing page.
Notes from practice.
Logical replication or dual writes, chunked backfill, checksum verification, a reversible cutover and a rollback you have actually tested. The full checklist.
Scope reduction, tokenization and segmentation: the architecture choices that decide a PCI-DSS Level 1 audit, plus the Go-specific ways card data leaks out.
Federation is a team-scaling tool, not a performance upgrade. The signals that justify splitting a Go GraphQL schema, what it costs, and the migration order.