Looking for a job

Alexandre Viseu

@aviseu

Freelance Senior Backend Engineer | PHP/Laravel & Go | Legacy modernisation, microservices, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS | 18 yrs backend, 11 with Laravel

Netherlands

Message

What I'm looking for

Senior backend engineer (PHP/Laravel, Go, ~20 years). Looking for a remote senior IC role: APIs, distributed services, infrastructure.

Based UTC+7: full APAC overlap, European mornings covered.

Not seeking people-management.

I'm a backend engineer with almost 20 years of experience. I've built systems from scratch, scaled them, and rescued a few that nobody else wanted to touch. One of them now handles over a million bookings a month.

Most of my career has been in PHP and Laravel. Greenfield builds, legacy overhauls, hexagonal refactors, CI/CD, Kafka, the works. The last few years I've also been working in Go, building microservices with proper observability: metrics, tracing, alerts, SLOs.

I spent six years as the (mostly) sole engineer behind a US startup, owning everything from architecture to server ops. I've also led teams, mentored juniors, and written the documentation people actually read.

These days I work independently through Viseu Labs with companies that need senior backend help. Stabilizing a legacy app, building a new service, fixing the delivery pipeline around it. I like problems I can own end to end.

Remote-first, based in the EU.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Get-e

Jun 2025 - Present (1 year 2 months)

Core backend engineer on a 110k-line Laravel hotels platform plus two microservices. Main contributor to its hexagonal-architecture refactor, now 75% of the application layer. Coverage 45%→76% (401→4,030 tests); authored the 80% diff-coverage gate. Built an exchange-rate service; moved deploys to GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.

PHP Laravel Go Kafka Redis MySQL Docker Kubernetes AWS Argo GitHub Actions PHPUnit ArgoCD Snowflake Hexagonal Architecture

Software Engineer (Contract) — Athlete's Thread

Viseu Labs

Apr 2026 - Aug 2026 (4 months)

Sole developer on a legacy Laravel service that had become a bottleneck for the wider platform, working directly with the operations director.

- Restored a CI pipeline that had been broken for four years and built out PHPUnit coverage from scratch
- Cut tickets requiring rework by 3x as coverage grew, with most defects now caught before reaching production rather than after
- Cleared the backlog

PHP Laravel MySQL PHPUnit CI CD REST APIs Postman

Software Developer

OneFit

Oct 2021 - May 2025 (3 years 7 months)

Backend engineer on a microservices platform spanning Laravel/MySQL and Node/MongoDB/Kafka/GraphQL, with 11 deployments on GCP Kubernetes.

- Maintained six microservices across the platform
- Designed, built and maintained a Go DDD microservice integrating multiple external APIs into the internal supply system; the service grew to one million monthly bookings
- Pioneered the organisation's observ

PostgreSQL Laravel MySQL Node MongoDB Microservices Kubernetes GCP DevOps Helm Docker GitHub Git Metrics API Development NodeJS PHP Go GraphQL

Lead Web Developer - Startup

Greek House

May 2015 - Oct 2021 (6 years 5 months)

Only permanent engineer on greekhouse.org across six years, building the product from scratch and running it in production throughout.

- Designed and implemented the full product in Laravel, MySQL and VueJS, carrying it forward from Laravel 5.1 through successive major versions
- Owned the entire technical stack: architecture, server operations (Ubuntu), backups (Bacula), database management, Dev

Laravel MySQL Vue.Js jQuery GitHub Git DigitalOcean API Development Ubuntu Bacula PHP

PHP/HTML5 Consultant

Affinity Portugal

Oct 2014 - Sep 2015 (11 months)

- Led the design and implementation of a C#/SQL Server prototype that won a government contract worth €500,000
- Rebuilt and normalised the front-end layout in HTML5, JavaScript (jQuery) and CSS3 to make a legacy desktop application screen-reader navigable — a requirement for a separate government contract
- Built the corporate internal message board on Moodle (PHP/MySQL) and maintained the intern

PHP MySQL C#Microsoft SQL Server jQuery CSS GitHub Git API Development

Freelance — Web Developer / Independent Contractor

Freelancing

Jan 2009 - Sep 2014 (5 years 8 months)

Independent contract work, primarily PHP/MySQL and JavaScript, specializing in the work other developers avoided: bug hunting in unfamiliar codebases, performance rescue and production firefighting.

PHP MySQL GitHub Git jQuery AJAX API Development

Lead Developer

Gran Mall Virtual

Oct 2011 - Apr 2013 (1 year 6 months)

Led a team of programmers and designers, covering recruitment, planning, oversight, quality testing and hands-on development.

Tech: PHP (MVC), MySQL, HTML, jQuery

PHP MySQL HTML jQuery GitHub Git MVC