Professional Profile

Experienced software engineer with the main interest in large distributed systems. 10+ years of expertise in PHP and SQL-driven software. More recently, utilising modern development tools such as the Go/Golang, Protocol Buffers and gRPC. Considering myself a full-stack developer with knowledge of frameworks such as React / VueJs and associated tooling. Furthermore, my experience of cloud platforms like AWS and GCP enables me to perform tasks such as setting up Kubernetes clusters, building custom Helm charts as well as full-fledged CI / CD pipelines. At the moment, directly managing software engineers with the focus on scaling the teams and ensuring smooth delivery of data-driven products.

Specialisation: Writing well-structured and testable code, developing and integrating the APIs
Main languages: PHP (10+ years), Go/Golang (3 years), JavaScript (10 years)
Common tools: Containers, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio, Serverless framework, Symfony / Laravel, React / VueJs, Pulumi
Databases: MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, RabbitMQ
Methodologies: Agile (Scrum or Kanban), CI / CD, TDD (Test-Driven Development), Microservices, Pair programming
Public Clouds: GCP, AWS
APIs: REST, gRPC/Protobuf, Pub/Sub, GraphQL

Work Experience

Dealroom.co | Amsterdam, NL

August 2021 - Present

Lead Software Engineer


  • Hiring, coaching and directly managing team of 6 software engineers (Go/Golang, PHP)
  • Working on the technical roadmap with the product owners and collaborating with other engineering and data squads to enable quick and continuous delivery of a business value
  • Architecture decisions for splitting monolith into microservices using Kubernetes, custom Helm charts, Istio, gRPC, Protobuf and Pub/Sub, which allowed company to rapidly scale the business

June 2019 - July 2021

Senior Software Engineer


  • Started as a senior PHP developer, working on a vast MySQL based monolith in an Agile team
  • Proposed, planned and executed complete rebuild of infrastructure, from the few boxes running in AWS EC2 to a fully distributed system running on GKE. Proved to be crucial for increasing both data size and API traffic by an order of magnitude in the following years.
  • Introducing and training team members to a many new technologies such as Go, Kubernetes, Helm, RabbitMQ and more

SO Connect | Amsterdam, NL

February 2018 - May 2019

Full Stack Engineer


  • Part of Agile (Scrum) team working on Docker-based PHP7 and NodeJS microservices
  • Maintaining core codebase based on the FuelPHP and Zend frameworks
  • Successfully developed brand new marketing product using React / Redux frontend and Laravel Lumen backend, which within a few months became the company’s most popular SaaS offering
  • Leading the transition from on-metal deployments to the Kubernetes using Helm charts
  • Setting up the serverless framework on AWS with ES2018 functions, webpack and Jest TDD

Docler Holding Luxembourg | Amsterdam, NL

October 2017 - January 2018

Senior Software Engineer


  • In December 2018, the company announced ceasing operations in the Netherlands
  • Involved in the significantly delayed project of introducing new performer category which was delivered within a few weeks I joined our scrum team
  • Fixing multiple security-related issues discovered by researchers (XSS, CSRF etc.)
  • Working on multiple PHP microservices as well as core legacy codebase

Cloudflare | London, UK

October 2016 - September 2017

Web Engineer


  • The web security company, covering roughly 10% of internet traffic at the time
  • Creating and maintaining PHP APIs with a lot of traffic (1 billion+ req/month)
  • Part of the early discussions and technical tweaks to introduce an upgrade to PHP7
  • Developed WebP API integration with the Cloudflare’s edge systems
  • Various improvements to the internal “page rules” engine
  • Working with many technologies such as Docker, Kyoto Tycoon, Redis etc.
  • Server-side work on the scaling of the PostgreSQL database (master/slave replication)

babylon health | London, UK

November 2015 - October 2016

Technical Lead


  • Largest doctor-on-demand startup in the UK
  • Heading technical efforts of the Predictive Analytics team
  • Designed and fully implemented separation of a monolithic codebase to multiple microservices which allowed for better mobile apps experience for the end user
  • Responsible for the hiring of new engineers i.e. PHP, Python and data scientists
  • Creating development standards and best practices followed across the team
  • Building out the architecture to support the delivery of the AI Predictive Analytics platforms

February 2015 - November 2015

Lead PHP Developer


  • Leading the team of PHP engineers across multiple products
  • Hiring, on-boarding and mentoring engineers to ensure quality and timely delivery
  • Part of the Health Intelligence team responsible for creating AI-based products
  • Successfully implemented ruling algorithm/engine for the medical triage
  • Developing and managing APIs used by millions of iOS and Android devices

LendInvest | London, UK

March 2014 - January 2015

Senior PHP Developer (Symfony)


  • LendInvest is leading online lender for short-term property finance
  • Transforming legacy code from CodeIgniter to Symfony2 framework
  • Greenfield project to rewrite P2P lending platform, both borrower and investor portals
  • Creating BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) testing suite using Behat 3
  • Integration of internal system with Amazon S3 storage service
  • Part of the bigger agile team, using lightweight Scrum methodology and some practices from XP
  • Redeveloped systems were successfully launched in December 2014 which enabled the company to eventually lower the minimum investment amount to £1,000

entrago | London, UK

January 2013 - December 2013

Senior Software Engineer


  • Early-stage startup, celebrity channels for fans
  • Rewriting API from Node.js to PHP (Laravel 4.2)
  • Maintaining CMS built on top of Node.js (Hatch.js framework)
  • Working with sizeable Redis database (~100+ GB)
  • Enhancing analytics system based on the PHP Zend Framework 2 with Predis
  • Development done under agile environment (Kanban)

Primrose | Reading, UK

December 2011 – September 2012

PHP Developer


  • One of the largest UK online gardening retailers
  • Maintained multiple eCommerce systems as part of the Agile team (Scrum)
  • Finding bottlenecks in performance by profiling/debugging PHP code (Xdebug, KCacheGrind) and MySQL queries. As a result, we went from 1600+ SQL queries on each page to less than 400 per page
  • Created reporting back-end system that was used for monitoring of the buyers accounts
  • Developed custom payment plugin (SOAP) which was successfully deployed on more than dozens E-Shops around the Europe (Docdata Payments)

Web Frameworks

Symfony (PHP) 90%
Laravel / Lumen (PHP) 80%
Gin (Go) 30%

Education

2012 – 2015

University of Greenwich, London

Bachelor of Engineering (BEng), Software Engineering

Technical Skills

PHP

Experienced, 10+ Years

Coding in PHP since 2005. Started commercially around 2011 by creating custom advertisement systems as a freelancer. Experienced with frameworks such Laravel / Lumen or Symfony however worked also with a lot of large, legacy codebases. Following modern standards such as PHP-FIG and PSRs.

Golang

Intermediate, 3 years

Golang is my preferred language for all the new microservices I write. Because it is relatively new and modern language, Google's engineers could create language without ugly legacy issues (looking at you PHP) and the results are amazing!

JavaScript

Experienced, 10 Years

I like JavaScript as a language, however it must be written very carefully in order to prevent callback hell in bigger codebases. As most of the web devs, I started with JQuery somewhere around 2007 (for AJAX mostly). Later moved on to Angular and most recently exploring ReactJS. Evolution of the front-end development field over the past years is fascinating.