Skip to content
appg.dev

About

Adrian Dobre

Lead Software Engineer at YouView · AI-native engineering · Engineering standards, performance and architecture for TV platforms and beyond

Profile

I’m a lead product engineer who changes how software gets built, not only what gets built.

At YouView I lead front-end engineering for the TV platform behind EE TV, Sony, TalkTalk and Freely: React and TypeScript running on set-top boxes with a fraction of a laptop’s memory. Over the last year my focus has moved to AI-native engineering: making AI coding agents produce production-grade work on a large, legacy codebase, and building the standards, CI gates and review culture that let an engineering team trust the result.

Standards as code
I turn engineering standards into machine-checkable rules: an LLM reviewer that checks every diff against the team’s front-end standards, and on-device frame-time benchmarks on every branch.
Knowledge as skills
Hard-won lessons (device debugging, memory profiling, low-memory React, CI triage) become reusable agent skills and living specs that both humans and agents follow.
Measured, reviewable delivery
Orchestrator and worker agent loops with explicit success thresholds, adversarial reviews, stress-tested fixes, and work split into small PRs a human can review in minutes.
Generative UI, long before it had a name
I’ve been researching and building spec- and data-driven interfaces for years, starting with CMS-driven pages. AI now lets those specs be composed for each person, by agents and by voice.
Performance that’s proven, not claimed
I’m building an agentic toolkit for performance analysis: frame-time instrumentation and a video-based frame analyser that agents drive to measure smoothness the way a viewer sees it.

Before YouView I spent 12+ years as a founder, consultant and principal engineer building web applications for brands in media, consumer goods, telecoms and retail, and led backend modernisation at Busabout.

Experience

  1. May 2021 – present

    London, hybrid

    Lead Software Engineer · YouView TV Ltd

    TV main UI for EE TV, Sony, TalkTalk and Freely · React and TypeScript on WPE WebKit and Chromium-based embedded browsers

    • Lead front-end architecture and delivery for the TV main UI.
    • Introduced and run an AI-native engineering practice: orchestrator and worker agent loops, shared agent skills, spec-first handovers and adversarial review.
    • Built an LLM reviewer that checks diffs against the team’s engineering standards, plus on-device frame-time benchmarks in CI.
    • Lead the performance work with devices in the loop for legacy and modern UI codebases: measured, agentic loops find and remove bottlenecks on real set-top boxes, and smoothness benchmarks run in CI.

  2. May 2008 – present

    London

    Founder, Consultant & Principal Engineer · Independent

    • Ran my own web development consultancy, building custom web applications for brands in media, consumer goods, telecoms and retail.

  3. Aug 2020 – May 2021

    London

    Senior Full Stack Engineer · DVELP, part of Sabio Group

    • Built conversational voice and chat bots for contact-centre customers with Node.js, TypeScript and React.
    • Led Node.js performance and memory optimisation of the bot services.
    • Moved the cloud services from manually managed instances to Google Cloud Run.

  4. Jan 2019 – Aug 2020

    UK

    Lead Backend Software Engineer · Busabout

    • Led modernisation of Busabout.com’s Laravel-based API, web services and applications towards an event-driven microservices architecture.

Tools

Libraries and tools I’m building for TV and adaptive interfaces: AgentFiber for voice and interaction, and an agentic performance analysis toolkit. Work in progress.

  • AgentFiber Voice ↗

    Composable voice packages for adaptive interfaces: deterministic speech matching with an extensible English UI grammar, provider-neutral capture and transcription, and a voice activity orb. Matching only proposes actions; the app keeps permission and execution authority. MIT licensed, on npm as @agentfiber/voice, voice-grammar-en, asr and voice-ui.

  • tv-fps ↗

    Framework-agnostic frame-time and smoothness instrumentation for TV and set-top box web apps: deterministic D-pad sweeps, HUDs, a Playwright helper and leaderboard publishing. Early releases on npm.

  • frame-analyser

    Grades UI smoothness from HDMI-captured video, which is what the viewer actually sees.

  • tv-benchmark

    A cross-framework benchmark on real set-top boxes: React DOM, Lightning 2 and 3, React on Lightning and a custom WebGL renderer.

Skills

  • AI-Native Software Engineering
  • Software Architecture
  • Front-End Performance Optimization

React / TypeScript / Product Engineering / Engineering Standards / Code Review / Developer Productivity / Technical Leadership / LLM Evaluation / Prompt Engineering / Continuous Integration / Playwright / WebGL / Cloudflare Workers

Background

Education

Universitatea Româno-Americană, Bucharest

Economics, Management · 2004 – 2008

Languages

English, German, Romanian

In a client’s words

“Quick, no nonsense, everything is possible, kind-of guy.”
Adrian Iordache, FCIArb · Client

Writing