Viljar Võidula
Westbygg
Website for a central-Estonian maker of handmade log cabins, built with traditional manual methods.
Available for contract work
Hello, I am a software development enthusiast based in Estonia.
Viljar Võidula
Senior Technical Product Manager · Platforms, APIs & AI
Technical product manager who came up through engineering — solutions architect, staff engineer and team lead, then interim CTO and founder. Strongest at rule-driven decisioning, matching quality and API contract design in regulated identity workflows.
viljar@5xer.comLinkedInGitHubTallinn / Paide, Estonia
Now: founder & product owner of Fivexer — and open to contract work alongside it.
Next: a product company with an interesting problem to solve.
Selected impact
70×
Decisioning at scale
Veriff’s task-assignment engine, routing verification sessions to reviewers under SLA — scaled from 10,000 to 700,000+ sessions at sub-second latency.
+8%
Matching beat Algolia
Owned matching and relevance for an AI search product that won a customer A/B test against Algolia and lifted conversion by about 8%.
€2.5M
Funding round
As interim CTO, led customer, partner and investor conversations, including technical due diligence for a €2.5M round.
99.999%
Availability
Held five-nines availability for major retail customers while reducing AWS spend.
- Measurement for detection quality. Designed an Airbyte, Amazon RDS and BigQuery platform processing millions of events per hour, used to validate algorithm behaviour in SQL.
- LLM automation with guardrails. Workflows that turn unstructured signals into reviewable, high-precision output, with human review to contain costly false positives.
Work with me
I take on contract and fractional work where product and engineering meet — usually when a team needs someone who can write the spec, design the system and stay through delivery.
Product discovery & specs
Turn a fuzzy problem into a written spec: schema, rules, failure cases and what “done” means.
Decisioning & matching systems
Routing, assignment and matching engines — measured with precision, recall and false-positive cost.
API & integration design
REST/GraphQL contracts, webhooks and versioning that partner teams can build against without you.
AI transformation & adoption
Find where LLM workflows actually pay off, build them with human review where mistakes are costly, and get the team using them.
Interim CTO & due diligence
Technical leadership through a growth phase, or the technical side of a funding round.
- Engagement
- Fractional or fixed project
- Where
- Remote from Estonia · on-site by arrangement
- Availability
- Open to new projects
- Rates
- €1,000/day · €125/hourHalf-day minimum · excl. VAT
Enquire about a contractBook a callEmail opens a short template — project, timeline, budget. Or pick a time in my calendar.
Experience
Founder & Product Owner
Fivexerformerly Forgemaster AI · RemoteOct 2024 – present- Led the pivot from Forgemaster AI to Fivexer when discovery showed the bigger problem: who does the work.
- Own an engine that plans rotas and routes tasks to people or AI agents, with an auditable reason per decision.
- Define REST APIs, JSON schemas and webhook contracts, and review the code.
- Run demos and pricing talks with prospects, feeding findings into the roadmap.
Technical Contractor — Product & Platform
VeriffTallinnOct 2025 – Sep 2026- Owned modernisation of the reviewer task-distribution system, from discovery to rollout.
- Specified and reviewed REST/GraphQL contracts and event flows around the decisioning engine.
- Improved operational data so throughput, queues and edge cases are measured.
- Turned recurring compliance-operations pain into scoped, prioritised increments.
Interim CTO
MirosTallinnJan – Aug 2024- Owned technical and product priorities through a growth phase, aligning build with sales.
- Launched an AI search platform that beat Algolia in a customer A/B test and lifted conversion by about 8%.
- Led technical due diligence for a €2.5M funding round.
- Held 99.999% availability for major retail customers while cutting AWS spend.
Staff Engineer — Search & Platform
MirosEstoniaMar 2023 – Aug 2024- Owned search relevance: tokenisation, fuzzy and multilingual matching, ranking.
- Built the measurement platform (millions of events per hour) and its validation SQL.
- Shipped a public GraphQL API for independent customer and team integrations.
- Led the AWS and Kubernetes migration and introduced OpenTelemetry observability.
Software Engineering Team Lead
VeriffTallinnJan 2022 – Jan 2023- Built the rule-driven task-assignment engine routing verification sessions to reviewers under SLA; helped scale it from 10,000 to 700,000+ sessions.
- Designed a unified GraphQL gateway so neighbouring teams shipped independently.
- Led and coached the team; made written proposals and design review the norm.
Earlier
- Solutions Architect
- Provisioning platform for custom MPLS services; IoT architecture for Tartu SmartEnCity.
- Founder
- Ran hiring, delivery, sales and partnerships through a successful exit in 2021.
- Network monitoring → software testing
- QA on the Samsung Smart TV app that won the IFA 2012 Innovation award.
Skills
- Product management
- Technical discovery, specification writing, roadmap & prioritisation, stakeholder management, pricing & packaging
- API & integration design
- REST, GraphQL, JSON Schemas, webhooks, contract & versioning strategy, partner integrations
- Matching & detection
- Fuzzy & multilingual matching, tokenisation, relevance ranking, precision/recall trade-offs, Vespa, Qdrant
- Rules & decisioning
- Decisioning & routing engines, SLA-driven prioritisation, queue design, human-in-the-loop review
- Data & analysis
- SQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Airbyte, A/B testing, product metrics
- AI & automation
- LLM workflows, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, vector databases, unstructured data extraction
- Engineering fluency
- Node.js, TypeScript, microservices, AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, code & schema review
- Regulated & client-facing
- KYC / KYB identity verification, telecommunications, technical due diligence, client enablement
How I work
Freedom to think
Room to question the problem and find a better answer — not a backlog to grind through.
Objectives, then results
A few key objectives everyone understands, followed through to measurable results — OKRs over sprint rituals.
Closest to the user
I work directly with customers and front-line teams; their problems set the priorities.
Earlier projects
Gamestreams
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
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)
Telia Connected 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)
Simote
IR-blaster platform that recorded user behaviour and replayed it across TV and set-top box hardware.
Personal
- Education
- Computer Technology / Computer Systems TechnologyKehtna School of Economics and Technology, 2006 – 2010Finance & Financial Management ServicesEstonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences, since 2015
- Languages
- Estonian (native) · English (fluent) · German (basic)
- Interests
- Licensed private pilot, PPL(A) — checklists and decisions under pressure. Snowboarding for 18 years. Helped build the handmade log house that is home.
- References
- See LinkedIn recommendations; direct references from managers, founders, partners and engineers on request.
