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Head of Development · Prague

I build products end to end — and keep them running.

Two games — Reapers' Tide, a dark-fantasy survivors-like for Steam, and Sporewright, an idle tower defense for phones — plus NovelCraft, an AI writing co-pilot that remembers your story. By day I lead a ~40-person engineering organisation at Skupina Klik.cz.

kinds of Blight in Sporewright, two of them bosses
11
weapons in Reapers’ Tide, fifteen of them evolving
17
languages NovelCraft writes in
20+
engineers in the organisation I lead
~40

What I build

Games

Two games I design, build and ship myself. Sporewright is coming to phones and Reapers' Tide to Steam. Follow along and tell me what you would want from them.

Idle tower defenseComing soon

Grow a glowing fungal spire and hold back endless waves of Blight.

An idle tower defense in a pitch-black fungal hollow, built for one-handed portrait play. Your spire aims and fires by itself; your only job is to decide what it grows into. Every run ends by design, and the Spores you bank make the next one start stronger — even while the app is closed.

  • Three upgrade trees — THORN, BARK and ROOT — and a spire that grows through five stages
  • Six tiers of Blight, eleven kinds of it, a boss every tenth wave
  • No account, no aiming: every input is a tap. Coming to the App Store and Google Play.
See the game, opens sporewright.com in a new tab
Survivors-likeComing 2027

A dark-fantasy pixel-art survivors-like: fifteen minutes, hundreds of dead, one reaper.

You move; your weapons fire on their own. Every soul you reap feeds a level-up that deals three cards — a new weapon, a stronger one, or a passive that bends the run. Hold up to six weapons, evolve them, and by the tenth minute the screen is a storm you built yourself. Then the final boss walks out of the dark.

  • Six heroes, four cursed realms, nine bosses, seventeen weapons and fifteen evolutions
  • Torment tiers, pacts and Heat for when the bosses fall too easily
  • Coming to Steam in 2027 for Windows, macOS, Linux and Steam Deck, with a free demo first
See the game, opens reaperstide.com in a new tab

Also building

Projects

A tool I build and run myself, live and free to start. Write a chapter and tell me what breaks.

AI writingLive

Write novels with an AI co-pilot that remembers your story.

You type; the co-pilot only writes when you ask. Suggestions stream in as ghost text at the caret and stay pencil until you accept them. A story bible tracks threads, promises and world facts from the chapters you have already written, and a character library keeps your cast consistent across books.

  • Writes in 20+ languages, with standard and premium AI models on Pro
  • Story bible built from what you already wrote; one-click character portraits on paid plans
  • Free to start with TXT export. Pro and Bedtime Stories — illustrated stories for little listeners — add EPUB and PDF.
Start writing free, opens novelcraft.ai in a new tab

Principles

How I build

Live beats impressive

A prototype that wows a room is not progress. NovelCraft lets you start a book on a free plan, and Reapers’ Tide gets a free demo before it gets a price. The feedback I trust comes from people who wanted the thing enough to try it, not from people I demoed it to.

I stay close to the code

Not because nobody else can write it, but because the architecture diagram and the repository are rarely the same thing — and the gap between them is where the real problems live.

Boring where it can be, novel where it must be

A game needs a simulation you can trust and a save that never loses a run. A writing tool needs an editor that never loses a word. The interesting parts earn their place on top of that.

Honest about what AI cannot do

I ship LLM features for a living and run one as a product. That makes me more careful, not less: NovelCraft suggests, the writer decides, and I say so plainly.

Background

About

Petr Jirouš

I'm an engineering leader based in Prague. I studied at the Czech Technical University and spent my first years building systems at Rohlik.cz and Bibloo, before moving into leadership at MallGroup and, since 2022, running development at Skupina Klik.cz.

What I care about is the distance between a demo and a system people trust. At work that means shipping RAG, agentic workflows and MCP servers into production and getting a whole engineering organisation working with AI tooling rather than around it. Outside work it means Reapers' Tide, Sporewright and NovelCraft — three products where there is no one else to hand the hard part to, which is exactly why I build them.

I also help run Claude Prague, a community for people building with AI in Central Europe — meetups, workshops, and the occasional argument about where this is all going.

Track record

Experience

Full CV on LinkedIn ↗, opens LinkedIn in a new tab
  1. Skupina Klik.cz

    Now

    Head of Development

    2022 — present

  2. NICE CXone

    Principal Software Engineer

    2021 — 2022

  3. MallGroup

    Engineering Manager

    2019 — 2021

  4. MallGroup

    Senior Lead Software Engineer

    2017 — 2019

  5. Bibloo

    Head of Development

    2017

  6. Rohlik.cz

    Lead Software Engineer

    2016 — 2017

Contact

Let's talk

Curious about Reapers' Tide or Sporewright, drafted a chapter in NovelCraft, or thinking about how engineering teams should work with AI? I would like to hear from you — bug reports and blunt feedback very much included.

[email protected]

Czech or English.