Professional Profile

Experienced cloud-native software engineer with a main interest in large distributed systems. Ten years of expertise in PHP and SQL-driven software. More recently, I have been 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 / Vue.js and associated tooling. Furthermore, my experience with cloud platforms like AWS and GCP enables me to perform tasks such as setting up Kubernetes clusters and building custom Helm charts full-fledged CI / CD pipelines. Currently, directly managing software engineers focusing on scaling the teams and ensuring the 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, Symfony / Laravel, React / Vue.js, 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 a 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 the monolith into microservices using Kubernetes, custom Helm charts, Istio, gRPC, Protobuf and Pub/Sub, which allowed the 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 a complete rebuild of infrastructure, from the few boxes running in AWS EC2 to a fully distributed system running on GKE. It 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 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 Node.js 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 Kubernetes using Helm charts
  • Setting up the serverless framework on AWS with ES2018 functions, webpack and Jest TDD

Cloudflare | London, UK

October 2016 — January 2018

Web Engineer


  • The web security company covered 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 (primary/replica setup)

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 the separation of a monolithic codebase to multiple microservices which allowed for a 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 the leading online lender for short-term property finance
  • Transforming legacy code from CodeIgniter to a 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 a sizable Redis database (~100+ GB)
  • Enhancing an 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 a reporting back-end system used for monitoring the buyer accounts
  • Developed custom payment plugin (SOAP) which was successfully deployed on more than dozens of E-Shops around 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 (B.Eng.), 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 as 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 a 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 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 and Vue.js. The evolution of the front-end development field over the past years is fascinating.