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Alexandru-George Gidei
Senior Software Engineer

About

Self-taught full-stack software engineer focusing on building back-end web APIs. I write clean, quality, tested code and deliver products and features that users enjoy. I'm an advocate of software development best practices and developer tools that help teams write better code. I support and enjoy contributing to open-source software.

Work Experience

10x Banking
London, UK (remote)
10x Banking is on a mission to transform banking for customers, banks, and society. Through a cloud-native core banking platform, 10x enables banks and financial services providers to give their customers more timely and relevant experiences and insights when it comes to managing money.
https://www.10xbanking.com
November 2022 – Present
Senior Software Engineer
Working in the Customer Onboarding & Management team to provide systems that allow banking clients to onboard customers and manage their data efficiently.
Highlights
  • Core technologies: Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, AWS.
  • Delivered and maintained a set of performant and fully-documented REST APIs for customer operations used directly by clients and internal services.
  • Complied with strict SLAs for availability, latency, and throughput.
  • Improved observability through alerts, dashboards, and tracing.
  • Spearheaded work to reorganise team's core services, allowing for decommissioning and contributing to organisational cost reduction goal.
  • Supported services with prompt resolution times based on company on-call policy.
  • Paired with and assisted team members on tasks of increased complexity and urgency.
  • Collaborated on crucial company-wide tech upgrade efforts to Java 17 and 21, Kotlin 1.9, and Spring Boot 3.
SamKnows
London, UK (remote)
SamKnows is on a mission to make the internet better for everyone. For ISPs, it helps set up, monitor, and troubleshoot connections. For Regulators, it provides market-leading measurement solutions to help conduct impartial studies on internet performance.
https://www.samknows.com
December 2021 – November 2022
Senior Software Engineer
Worked in the Home Product team to help ISP customer support staff resolve queries faster and allow individual users to test and monitor their home connections.
Highlights
  • Core technologies: PHP + Symfony, Java + Spring Boot, Apache Kafka, BigQuery, MySQL, GCP.
  • Led backend development work for a project involving the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s Broadband Data Collection (BDC) program.
  • Designed and implemented high throughput data pipelines, applications, and APIs.
  • Improved customer satisfaction by solving performance issues in key areas of the platform.
  • Devised a system to monitor BigQuery data usage costs for a given API and product.
  • Performed load testing on a critical API as part of a project for a major UK ISP; reported and addressed performance constraints.
  • Introduced new code quality standards and tools for static analysis, test coverage, and mutation testing.
  • Collaborated in dockerizing and migrating applications from bare-metal servers to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Goodlord
London, UK
Goodlord's mission is to provide the best renting experience in the world. Through its award-winning platform, it aims to streamline the lettings process for agents, landlords, and tenants alike.
https://www.goodlord.co
November 2018 – December 2021
Software Engineer
Worked in the Product & Engineering team to realise the company's mission and objectives: building products, features, and services that attract new clients, save admin time and costs, and improve user experience.
Highlights
  • Core technologies: PHP + Symfony, React + TypeScript, MySQL, AWS.
  • Collaborated with product managers and other key business stakeholders to plan, define, and deliver features across the entire application development life cycle.
  • Built reliable, robust applications and features both individually and through pairing.
  • Integrated with external APIs to create new products and provide customers with a seamless user experience.
  • Assisted teammates to overcome obstacles, resolve blockers, and complete deliverable units of value in a timely manner.
  • Initiated and executed multiple software modernisation projects: refactoring legacy code, updating to PHP 7.4, Symfony 5.
  • Led development of a new PHP 8 application specialised in payments and rent collection; designed and implemented new database schema.
  • Defined and developed GitHub Actions workflows to run a complete suite of jobs: coding standards; code quality checks and tools; unit and integration tests.
  • Improved code quality and reduced the incidence of bugs by introducing tools, defining coding standards, and training team members.
  • Initiated efforts to increase testing effectiveness and coverage: introduced unit testing coverage and mutation testing into the PHP codebase. Actively contributed to an increase in coverage from 30% to 60%+.
  • Mentored and supported junior and trainee engineers in learning about the back-end, REST APIs, PHP, and the Symfony framework.
  • Expanded the application's end-to-end testing suite using Nightwatch.js and TypeScript.

Contact

London UK
alex.gidei@gmail.com
https://alexandrugg.github.io
GitHub
AlexandruGG
LinkedIn
alexgidei

Education

Skills

Programming Languages
Kotlin Java PHP TypeScript Scala Bash Rust Go Python
Frameworks/Libraries
Spring Boot ORM: Hibernate, Doctrine Quarkus Symfony React Redux Scala Cats Flask
Testing
TDD/BDD JUnit Mockito Contract Testing - Pact Cucumber Mutation Testing - Pitest, Infection PHPUnit PHPSpec Prophecy Behat Jest React Testing Library Nightwatch.js Cypress ScalaTest ScalaCheck Ginkgo
Storage
PostgreSQL MySQL BigQuery SQLite Redis Memcached
Observability
Open Telemetry New Relic Prometheus Grafana Sentry Datadog
Infrastructure
AWS GCP Docker Kubernetes
Event/Messaging Systems
Apache Kafka (Confluent) Amazon SQS Amazon EventBridge Redis Streams
DevOps/VCS
Git CI/CD GitHub Actions CircleCI Semaphore CI
Principles/Paradigms
OOP FP SOLID Domain-Driven Design REST
Agile Project Management
Agile Kanban Jira Confluence

Interests

Activities
Bouldering Basketball Powerlifting
Hobbies
Electric guitar Chess