Runar Buvik

Software engineer and CTO in Trondheim, Norway.

I have spent twenty years building production systems: search engines, machine learning and computer vision pipelines, scrapers, and the cloud infrastructure underneath them. I have founded and led the engineering at several startups, and I still write most of the code myself. Python, TypeScript, C and Perl, mostly on AWS, where I have had an account since 2006.

Now

• CTO, Bolig.ai Since 2020, part-time since 2022 A Norwegian real estate intelligence platform with data on more than 400,000 homes and over 20 million indoor photos. I designed the cloud architecture and built the backend, the data ingestion and the integration with the Norwegian Mapping Authority.
• Runar Buvik AS Since 2006 My consulting company. Contract work on software architecture, machine learning, search and AWS infrastructure.

Earlier

• Head of Software, Carbon Crusher 2022 – 2026 Engineering lead for Skyroads, a computer-vision tool that helps road owners predict and plan maintenance. Carbon Crusher rebuilds roads by crushing and reusing the material already in place. I built the vision pipeline and inference system and the cross-platform mobile app, and ran a small product team.
• CTO, Alva Technologies (now Hjemla.no) 2017 – 2020 Led a five-engineer team building an automated valuation model used by leading Norwegian real estate brokers, and a system that reads 150-plus pages of property documentation per listing and generates the sales prospectus.
• Independent contractor, Apple (Siri) 2016 – 2017 Natural language processing and machine learning, on site in Cupertino and Paris.
• Senior backend developer, ABC Startsiden 2015 – 2016 Search and backend features for startsiden.no, one of Norway's most visited sites.
• Founder and CTO, Searchdaimon 2005 – 2015 An open-source enterprise search engine written in C and Perl, with connectors for Windows security, SharePoint and Exchange. One of the first Standard Technology Partners of Amazon Web Services.
• Founder, Boitho 2003 – 2005 An internet-scale search engine that ran across many servers in parallel, with a distributed crawler that let users donate spare compute and bandwidth, and bfs, an early shared-nothing distributed file system.

Side projects and open source

• AnaRank: records what analysts said about asset prices and plots it on the chart, so predictions can be judged afterwards.
• Motorverdi: an early-stage Norwegian car history and valuation service.
• Portable-VirtualBox: run any operating system from a USB stick without installing anything. Around 40,000 downloads a month at its peak.
• ProxyMaid: an open-source proxy checker.
• More on GitHub, including Perl modules for perceptual image hashing and Google BigQuery.

Background

Studied informatics at NTNU (2001 – 2006) before leaving to found Searchdaimon. Executive MBA from BI Norwegian Business School (2019 – 2020), with courses at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Trained as a service electronics technician first (1997 – 2000), which is where the interest in robotics and microcontrollers started.

Away from the keyboard I hike and renovate a house, doing most of the carpentry, drywall and masonry myself.

Contact

• Email: runarb@gmail.com
• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• CV (PDF)