Alexandru Zaitzev

Work

Competitions, client work and personal projects, with what I did in each.

Sep 2026

Nordic AI Cup 2026

Context
Nordic AI Cup · with Elysa's Secret
My role
Owner of the Survival Simulator task
Result
Team: 1st in Denmark, 2nd in the Nordics

Three AI tasks scored together over four days. I owned the Survival Simulator, where a colony controller has to keep its agents alive among fruit, trees and predators.

What I did

  • Read the reward straight out of the simulator source, so we optimised what was actually scored.
  • Ran an evolutionary search over candidate controllers.
  • Built a bit-exact local simulator and chased determinism until a seed always meant the same run.
  • Tested and analysed a teammate's alternative controller until we understood why it was better, reaching a best validation of 1,812 from a first score of 308.
  • 1stin Denmark, team result
  • 0.54points off 1st in the Nordics
  • 1,812my best validation score
  • Evolutionary search
  • Simulation
  • Machine learning
Read the team's full story ↗

Nov 2026

PHAROS

Context
European Defense Tech Hackathon · Copenhagen
My role
Operator console and shore service
Result
Pitched to the jury

Software that lets five small uncrewed boats guard undersea cables together, with no boat in charge and one operator approving what matters.

What I did

  • Built the shore service the fleet reports to.
  • Built the operator console: fleet list, alerts, approvals, event timeline and replay.
  • Kept a human on the loop: watching is automatic, closing in on a ship waits for the operator's approval.
  • 5boats, none in charge
  • 387tests written in one weekend
  • 91pull requests merged

Team figures, four-person team.

  • Multi-agent systems
  • Operator UI
  • Simulation
Read the team's full story ↗

Jan – Jul 2026

Lucaffè

Context
Lucaffè Srl · Chișinău, Moldova
My role
Digital Systems Coordinator
Result
Contributed to a 22% rise in profitability

Digitalised the day-to-day operations of a restaurant business, from the till to the kitchen.

What I did

  • Administered and configured the Syrve restaurant system: products, suppliers, inventory and invoices.
  • Integrated the POS with banking services, food delivery platforms and the kitchen display system.
  • Automated communication between ordering and the kitchen, removing manual steps and speeding up service.
  • Trained the staff and provided ongoing technical support.
  • Systems integration
  • Automation
  • Digitalisation
  • Training

Nov 2026

zaitzev.com

Context
Personal project
My role
Design and development
Result
This site

A personal site with a real-time shader hero, shader-based page transitions and posts published from Notion.

What I did

  • Wrote the GLSL for the ink hero and the page transition.
  • Built a Notion-to-static pipeline that also processes and strips every photo.
  • Exported as a static site on Cloudflare Pages.
  • Next.js
  • WebGL
  • GLSL
  • Notion API