My primary professional focus is rapidly growing teams working within Product driven frameworks. Spent more than a decade of developing bespoke JVM backends with emphasis on scalability, resilience and business flexiblity. Boostrapped a startup Engineering Department and it's platform in the cloud (AWS and Oracle Cloud) and Clound Native technologies. From analysis and design to the development of EDA and SOA architectures, their integration with external systems, security and an emphasis on software delivery using Agile methodologies. Specialties: Java, Scala, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Distributed Systems, UML, XML, SOA, REST, JEE, maven, sbt, HTML, CSS, Jenkins CI, Agile, Architecture, Spring Framework, Spring Integration, Spring Security, JPA, Spring JPA, SQL, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes.

Skills

Management

Advanced
  • Recrutment and interviewing
  • Line managment
  • Agile
  • Stakeholder management
  • Leadership

Backend

Master
  • Java
  • Scala
  • Akka
  • Spring
  • Architecture
  • CQRS
  • Event Sourcing
  • REST
  • JEE
  • JPA
  • SQL
  • Postgres
  • Cassandra
  • Kafka
  • UML
  • XML
  • SOA
  • Maven
  • Sbt

Devops

Advanced
  • AWS
  • OCI
  • Helm
  • Puppet
  • Docker
  • Jenkins
  • CI/CD
  • gitlab
  • gitlab-runner
  • Kubernetes
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • ArgoCD

Frontend

Intermediate
  • HTML/JSX
  • CSS
  • Javascript/Typescript
  • React
  • vue.js

Work Experience (7)

 Croatia
Bootstraped Engineering department from scratch, defined core architecture and responsible for business objectives and delivery.
  • Established the Engineering department, recruiting for the main technical team to some 20 people and helping department heads with all round interview processes
  • Applied Agile delivery methods for the department and directly managed the team until it grew enough for the first split and introduced Product Owners into the organisation
  • Designed a robust data pipeline needed to support the organisation of Fixtures, Industry Odds and Odds generation as defined in Year One MVP
  • Established a repeatable process and architecture to the Quant team allowing us to generate Odds with a clear 'paved road' on expanding the offerings across more sports with new models
  • Team performed and executed integration with BetGenius, Sportradar, TxOdds and LSports in a year
  • Worked with DevOps to establish cloud native deployment strategy with CI/CD using Kubernetes and ArgoCD
  • Established the vision for a modern SaaS with multitenancy and dedicated Technical Writer
  • Kicked off creation of Backend, Frontend and QA chapter and worked closely with Data Engineers and Technical Writer
  • Executed cloud migration from AWS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and slashed costs by more than a half
  • Delivered pricing stack for Basketball, US Football, Baseball, Ice Hockey, generating peakes of 5k market updates per second and handling the full market creation lifecycle, including event creation, automated mapping, resulting, and Single Game Parlay offering (BetBuilder)
  • Expanded the platform to process external bets and provide MTS capabilities, liability view, customer profiling, industry odds tracking
  • Managed the technology transition, system and IP integration and transition plan due to a company merger
 Gibraltar
Contributed to a dedicated backend performance and architecture team, defined backend architecture roadmap, profiled and modernised parts of the monolithic backend.
  • Designed a solution definition introducing streaming to the sportsbook catalog update stream, increasing resiliency mechanisms by removing single points of failure, providing migration path and strategy.
  • Worked with the team to define a clustering solution
  • Worked with the team to define CI/CD practices
  • Optimised betslip size up to 30%
  • Profiling various components of the system, identifying and refactoring the system.
 Gibraltar
Formed a QA department from scratch, helped drive product delivery in a dynamic and energyzing environment, learned a new set of skills and gained technical insight in working with QA engineers. Ensured Quality is essential part of the SLDC and delivery
  • Recruited a collocated QA team from scratch.
  • Defined guideline and vision for test automation.
  • Took over the test management suite in order to map out the test plan and test results into a unified view for the business.
  • Worked with automation engineers to define the end-goal e2e strategy and unified it on top of webdriver.io
  • Deprecated obsolete selenium e2e covering the frontend.
  • Supported interim vision to cover web using Cypress as much as possible in order to provide immediate business benefits.
  • Maintained working relationship with external test houses to cover localized test scenarios including platform and payments.
  • Worked closely with product delivery to implement an Agile workflow and drive releases with the development pods.
Adaptation of William Hill european technology Sportsbook stack to work with US technology stack
  • Tasked with enabling the integrations with our US based Sportsbook ahead of the US launch. Delivered on deadline.
  • Kicked off integration work on William Hill Betting Engine product catalogue.
  • Conceived next generation global sportbook product catalogue based completely on reactive platform principles and design. Lagom, Kafka, Cassandra, Akka, Akka-Streams, gRPC, AVRO.
  • Recruitment.
Took on the Line Management of the Backend Development team in Gibraltar.
  • Introduced Scala to the Development Community of Practice with Training courses.
  • Delivered first Scala microservice used to device type detection, based on the Twitter Finagle stack and - published lessons learned.
  • Delivered second Scala microservice system used for Real-time Notifications based on distributed Akka cluster and Cassandra.
  • Picked up team PDS guidance which delivers the Sportsbook catalog as an API. Introduced Kafka, added Scala as part of the wider microservice system, integrated with multiple external data providers.
  • Delivered third Scala microservice system used for Gamification of the User Experience based on Akka cluster, Akka Persistance (CQRS), Cassandra and Kafka with a custom Rules Engine.
  • Performed three major recruitment pushes.
  • Had zero churn in the teams in what was one of the most difficult years in the company.
  • Created from scratch a support team responsible for the stability of the Sportsbook and managing its ROTA and actions.
  • Founded Gibraltar Software Development Community Meetup group and organised meetups promoting technical excellence.
  • Created lasting relationship with the 47deg Cádiz Team.
  • Leadership, Team (re)building, Innovation, Contractors, SMACK stack, Community of Practice, DevOps, Redundancies Management
Took on the role as Senior Developer responsible for the team delivering the API driving the main mobile Sportsbook product.
  • Inherited Service Layer as Senior Developer.
  • Extended it for Italian and Spanish product pushes.
  • Delivered the Lottery API for the William Hill new mobile Sportsbook.
  • Delivered a POC of a Hybrid Bonus Wallet and validated internal capability opening way for the business to endevour in building our own Bonus engine.
  • Delivered the award-winning William Hill Priority Access Card payment integration system with FIS Global, acting as as a middlerware to directly access account funds.
  • Team management, Hiring, Innovation, Operations, Networking, Team Building, Tech Culture.
Started with William Hill and worked predominantely with Mobile and Integration APIs.
  • Worked on the first generation of William Hill mobile APIs MINT API, JSON-RPC style.
  • Worked on the second generation of William Hill's mobile API's - Service Layer, JAX-RS.
  • Worked on the WH API team to deliver B2B API integration endpoints via Layer 7 API gateway middleware.
  • REST Web Services development, Test Frameworks, API Governance, Architecture, Scrum, 3rd Parties interaction

Education (1)

1999 - 2007
Bachelors
 Software Engineering (incomplete)
The University of Bologna

Awards

Innovation of the Year
EGR Awards

Interests

Computers

Music

Reading

Open Source

References

“Srdan is really competent software engineer, he provided really interesting technologies and solutions that really helped the CSAI realization success. It was the best work esperience I ever had.”
Patrick Di Loreto, CTO
“Srdan is both the inspiration and the tech ‘conscience’ in a development team; A true ‘engineer’ he ‘eats’ framework/ language variants (it’s all just engineering), and always lands quickly on ‘the right thing’ to do – which means that when you need to change your build 'n' months down the line, then that’s a straightforward refactor rather than a complete rewrite. As a senior practitioner he helps the team establish the necessary ‘rhythm’ to drive incremental design / development, leading to ‘done’ state effortlessly (through code-first / leading-from-the-front example). As Development Team Lead he is an ‘active’ coach who intuitively understands how to establish and grow engineering talent & capability.”
Finbarr Joy, CTO/CIO