Victor D.

Principal Backend Engineer | Distributed Systems Architect

With three decades of experience in IT systems - including 20 years focused on backend engineering for high-availability, high-load applications - I specialize in designing, implementing and optimizing scalable, fault-tolerant architectures. My work spans real-time data processing, microservices modernization, and cloud-based distributed systems, with an emphasis on clean, maintainable, and rigorously tested solutions. Core Technical Expertise: Languages & Frameworks: - Java, Kotlin, Groovy - Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Micronaut, Quarkus Databases & Storage: - Relational: PostgreSQL, MySQL - NoSQL: MongoDB, DynamoDB - In-Memory/Caching: Redis, Hazelcast Cloud & Infrastructure: - AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, EKS, ECS, Lambda, SQS, SNS) - Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Istio Messaging & Event-Driven Systems: Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS/SNS Testing & Reliability: - Test-Driven Development (TDD) - Unit, Integration, Performance, and Stress Testing (JMeter, Gatling, custom tooling) Selected Career Highlights: Real-Time Social Media Analytics Platform (2016 US Election): Designed and implemented an AWS-based system processing 10M+ tweets/day with sub-second latency, handling bursts of 1,000+ events/sec without data loss. Upwork Core Services Modernization: Led migration from a monolithic legacy system to set of microservices, reducing offer creation time from 10-15s to less than 1s. Improved system throughput 10x while reducing maintenance overhead. Implemented comprehensive test suites (unit, integration, load) to ensure stability. Development Philosophy: Strong emphasis on testing and maintainability: Every system I build incorporates TDD, performance benchmarking, and failure simulation to ensure robustness.