Looking for a job

Alex Zabava

@alexzabava

Senior Java Developer | Spring, AWS, High-load & Microservices | 6+ years of experience | EU residence & work permit | Open to relocation

Spain

Message

What I'm looking for

I'm open to relocation and to building scalable, reliable systems with stacks beyond Java.

Senior Software Developer with 6+ years of experience in building high-load systems and microservices architectures. Worked across retail, fintech, and gaming, including projects for IKEA and KFC. Technical expertise includes Java, Kotlin, Spring, and AWS, with a strong emphasis on scalable, reliable solutions. Led a zero-downtime migration of 1M+ users to a new Java platform and built payment modules processing over 12 000 transactions a day. Open to working with other technical stacks beyond Java.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Backend Engineer

Current

Datsteam

Apr 2023 - Present (3 years 5 months)

Owned architecture, roadmap, and delivery end-to-end for a cross-game promotional and rewards engine handling up to 5000 events per second. Led a zero-downtime migration of 1M+ users off a legacy PHP monolith to Java, finishing around 3 months ahead of schedule.

Java Kotlin Kafka Streams Debezium Micrometers Grafana Elasticsearch Caffeine Redis Hazelcast Centrifugo Gatling Architecture Decisions Claude Code

Backend Developer

KFC (via Surf Studio)

May 2022 - Apr 2023 (11 months)

Built the backend for an employee scheduling portal in Kotlin and Java microservices, used across 200+ restaurants. Designed an event-driven notification service using Kafka and the Outbox pattern, and set up CI/CD pipelines across 4 environments.

Kotlin Java AWS AWS ECS Amazon RDS For PostgreSQL Ansible Kafka Outbox Pattern Gitlab CI Docker Mentorship

Java Developer

BPC Group

Mar 2021 - May 2022 (1 year 2 months)

Built internal P2P transaction validation and refunds modules processing 12000+ transactions per day. Modernized legacy payment gateway services onto Spring and Maven, cutting build time by 34%, and delivered a full-stack CRM for IKEA staff.

Java Spring Framework Maven Kafka CompletableFuture REST JWT 3D Secure Angular PostgreSQL Liquibase

Junior Java Developer

Diasoft

Apr 2020 - Mar 2021 (11 months)

Built an automated test suite for backend services, raising coverage from 17% to 85%. Developed a real-time securities monitoring feature using Kafka and WebSockets, and migrated legacy Angular forms to reduce page load time by 19%.

Java Kafka WebSockets PostgreSQL Liquibase Angular Unit Testing Integration Testing