Alejandro Garcia Seco

Alejandro García Seco

Summary

I am Senior Backend Engineer with +15y of experience in designing and building backend systems, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems and event-driven architectures, coupled with a strong sense ownership, a proven ability to mentor peers, experience in shaping and leading technical projects as well as trade off analysis. Throughout my career I’ve made impactful contributions to companies ranging from startups, scale-ups to established organizations.

Since I’ll spend at least 1/3 of my life working, my highest motivation is to create as much possitive impact as possible with the work I do.

Curious by nature, constantly learning… - currently embracing AI to be a more efficient Engineer.

Professional experience

Senior Backend Engineer at Playtomic | Remote, Spain | April 2024 - Present

At Playtomic I joined the Payments Tribe, where it’s an everyday challenge to deal with complexity, ambiguity and business-critical systems with poorly designed and hard to maintain code bases. So far I have successfully contributed in following areas:

Migrating the core payments flow from a pessimistic to an optimistic locking strategy, which improved the payments processing latency from seconds (up +30s in some scenarios) to just a few milliseconds.
Co-coordinated the Payments Platform roadmap, which resulted in several Code Quality improvement initiatives that I’m leading:
- Code Quality Metrics & Quality Gates – PoC of mechanisms to assess, track and enforce code quality across services, with a focus on maintainability.
- Defining Software Design & Architecture Principles – establishing guidelines emphasizing vertical slicing, I/O decoupling and domain modelling among other Engineering best practices in order to improve maintainability of the code bases.
Automation of large scale changes accross repositories using Generative AI.
Refactoring the core payments flow in order to reduce accumulated technical debt and standardizing payments processing, which would allow iterating faster in further product interations.

Skills: Java · Infrastructure as code (IaC) · Datadog · Apache Kafka · Code Quality · Refactoring · Generative AI for Software Development · Finance

Senior Backend Engineer at Wallapop | Barcelona, Spain | Jul 2021 - Oct 2024 (+3y)

As part of the Platform Tribe, I have mentored peers, influenced team processes and contributed to company-wide technical strategy. Some remarkable contributions were:

International expansion enablement
Design and implementation of a new multi-channel communications system for the end users, with high throughput, high availability and maintainability as key system qualities
Optimisation of Wallapop’s cloud infrastructure costs, as part of a company-wide costs optimisation initiative
Design and implementation of a new observability platform
Implementation of a CDN for Wallapop’s public API, to both reduce users’ latency and reduce costs
Improving the event-driven architecture by implementing new Event Bus and Command Bus libraries for high throughput and improved observability
Implementation of a new Identity and Access Management system
Revamp of the on-call scheme and processes

Skills: Kotlin · Domain-Driven Design (DDD) · Software Architecture · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Infrastructure as code (IaC) · Amazon Dynamodb · Functional Programming · Elastic Stack (ELK) · RabbitMQ · Apache Kafka · Python (Programming Language) · Software Design · Ports and Adapters · OAuth 2 · OpenID Connect · Keycloak · Observability · Grafana · Fluentd · InfluxDB · Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) · Containerization and orchestration · Distributed Systems

Senior Software Engineer at Marfeel | Barcelona, Spain | Jun 2020 - Jun 2021 (1y)

As part of the Core Platform team, I initially contributed on refactoring and evolving a monolithic system serving over 1B sessions per month into a microservices architecture. Later on, I helped to build backend components for a new analytics product that provided publishers with advanced content insights, leveraging a non-blocking programming model for high throughput and observability.

Skills: Java · Reactor · Functional Programming · Software Design · Observability · React.js

Caravelo | Barcelona, Spain | Jun 2014 - Jun 2020 (6y)

Technical Lead | Jan 2020 - Jun 2020

Senior Software Engineer | Jun 2014 - Jan 2020

Designed and implemented product lines with multi-tenancy, scalability and maintainability as strong requirements. Led projects including an automated revenue optimization system for airlines, a virtual agents (chatbots) platform for travel servicing and retailing, and an internal headless CMS for content distribution. Actively contributed to team growth through onboarding, mentoring and participation in the hiring processes.

Skills: Java · Groovy · Node.js · Amazon Web Services (AWS) · Hazelcast

Software Developer at Irish Manufacturing Research | Dublin, Ireland | Jun 2012 - Jun 2014 (2y)

Design, implementation and benchmarking of the Workplace Knowledge System, a software solution to help engineers in capturing and managing tacit knowledge on the factory floor. MVP with proven success after carrying out several pilots.

DMF Senior (Analyst Programmer) at Everis | Seville, Spain | May 2011 - Jun 2012 (~1y)

Development of web apps and portals for public administrations mainly on Java EE. Analysis, specs definition as well mentoring and assisting a team of 2/3 fellow developers.

Software Developer at Tier1, S.A. | Seville, Spain | Apr 2007 - Apr 2011 (4y)

Development of web apps, ERP and electronic invoicing platform on Java and related technologies/frameworks.