About 7code — Senior AI Engineering Team
7Code is an AI-first software engineering agency based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Since 2016, we've designed, built, and operated AI-native products, LLM integrations, and cloud infrastructure for founders and product teams across Europe, the UK, and the Middle East, acting as the senior engineering team they needed but didn't want to hire full-time.
A Cluj-Napoca engineering team with a track record across 12 industries
We were founded in Cluj-Napoca, Romania's fastest-growing tech hub, with a single belief: that a small, senior, well-organised team consistently outperforms a large, bloated one. Every engineer at 7Code is hands-on, every project gets direct access to the people who actually write the code, and every engagement is treated as a product partnership, not a service contract.
From HIPAA-compliant HealthTech platforms and European Parliament e-voting infrastructure to real-time IoT fleet systems and LLM-powered consumer apps, we've shipped across the full stack, and across the full risk spectrum. Our clients range from early-stage founders raising their first round to established enterprises integrating AI into production systems that can't go down.
Cluj-Napoca gives us a structural advantage: a deep pool of senior engineering talent, a lower cost base than Western Europe, and a timezone that overlaps comfortably with the UK, EU, and even UAE teams. We're Romanian-built and globally delivered.
Always deliver more than expected.
Four principles that shape how we hire, how we sell, how we operate, and how we grow, in that order.
Always deliver more than expected
Going beyond the brief is not a courtesy, it's a standard. We track client satisfaction as a business metric and treat every engagement as an opportunity to earn a long-term partner, not just close a project.
Build a scalable, predictable sales engine
Growth built on referrals and luck has a ceiling. We're building a structured, repeatable process for finding and winning clients, so the pipeline is something we design, not something that happens to us.
Hire slowly, fire quickly
Every hire shapes the culture and the quality bar. We take as long as we need to find people who are genuinely skilled and genuinely aligned with our values. We don't compromise on either, and we act fast when something isn't working.
Build a reliable, autonomous core team
The best companies run on a team that doesn't need constant oversight. We invest in people who can own outcomes end-to-end: trusted enough to make decisions, skilled enough to make good ones, and aligned enough that they don't need to be told twice.
Four values, lived daily.
These aren't words on a wall. They're the criteria we use when hiring, the standard we hold each other to, and the reason clients keep coming back.
Happy, satisfied clients
Client success is the only metric that matters at the end of an engagement. We measure outcomes, not hours logged, and we don't consider a project done until the client is genuinely happy with what was built and how it was built.
Growth, personal and professional
Everyone at 7Code is on a growth trajectory. We create space for learning, encourage stretch assignments, give honest feedback, and share the context people need to keep developing. Stagnation is a warning sign, not a steady state.
Strong teamwork and collaboration
We build complex software in tight timelines, which only works if the team actually functions as a team. Clear communication, shared ownership of outcomes, and genuine respect for each other's work are not aspirations, they're how we operate.
A fun, positive work environment
The best work comes from people who enjoy showing up. We take our craft seriously and our culture deliberately, because a positive environment isn't a perk, it's a competitive advantage that shows up in the quality of what we ship.
The people behind the work
A tight-knit leadership team with deep technical roots, a shared obsession with quality, and enough client work under their belts to know what actually matters when a project is under pressure.
Nicu Mardari founded 7code in Cluj-Napoca in 2016, building it from a boutique software studio into a specialist AI product engineering firm serving clients across the UK, EU, UAE, and US. As CEO, Nicu leads business development, client strategy, and commercial operations, working directly with founders, CTOs, and technology leaders on AI automation and product engineering engagements. He brings a decade of experience in nearshore software delivery and AI-first product strategy.
Igor Mardari is the co-founder and CTO of 7code, responsible for technical strategy, engineering standards, and the architecture of client AI systems. Since co-founding 7code in 2016, Igor has led the technical evolution of the company from general software development into AI-native product engineering and cloud agentic infrastructure. He brings deep expertise in LLM system design, cloud architecture at scale, and AI product evaluation frameworks, and sets the technical quality standards that underpin 7code's senior-only delivery model.
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