Profileimage by Ionut Baranga Hands-On Tech Lead / Solution Architect from Bucharest

Ionut Baranga

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Last update: 15.09.2023

Hands-On Tech Lead / Solution Architect

Graduation: M.Sc. Internet Systems Engineering
Hourly-/Daily rates: show
Languages: English (Full Professional)

Attachments

Ionut-Baranga-s-CV_240823.pdf

Skills

A product-focused problem-solver at heart, helping product companies build clean, maintainable, scalable & purpose-fit software solutions.

Experience Highlights
 
  • 11+ years of full-stack experience - Java, Node.js, React.js
  • Redesigned a SaaS Platform from scratch using AWS services like EKS, DynamoDB, SQS, S3, CloudFormation
  • Expertise in domains like e-Commerce, Sports-Betting, Automotive-Financial, Micro-Mobility and Ad-Tech
  • Played pivotal roles in requirements analysis, use-cases mapping, solution design, key architectural decisions, cloud migrations, and proactively addressing performance, scalability, and tech-debt concerns for high-impact projects.
  • Working remotely since 2019 in distributed and autonomous teams communicating asynchronously

Project history

06/2023 - Present
Lead Backend Engineer
US startup in stealth mode (Internet and Information Technology)

The client, a US startup in stealth mode developing a social app, was looking for an expert-level back-end engineer to review, optimize and make production-ready the existing backend codebase, while also implementing additional features.

I took full responsibility of the backend development and worked in close collaboration with the company owner, a Google Cloud Expert and a Senior Mobile Developer.

✔️ Identified key user interactions areas in need for optimisation, by analyzing API usage patterns from the mobile app

✔️ Enhanced application security, maintainability and error handling by migrating it from JavaScript to TypeScript and adopting schema-based request validators, and introducing API integration testing

✔️ Improved data retrieval speed by optimizing MongoDB queries and indexing, including specialized geospatial queries

✔️ Ensured consistency across environments and reduced potential troubleshooting time by establishing prod-dev parity

✔️ Enhanced system monitoring capabilities by introducing structured logging 

Skills: Firebase · docker · MongoDB · Requirements Analysis · TypeScript · Technical Solution Design · REST API · Express.js · Node.js · Microservices

02/2023 - 08/2023
Hand-On Tech Lead & AWS Solution Architect
Digital Marketing Analytics SaaS Platform (Internet and Information Technology)

The client, a Digital Marketing Analytics SaaS Platform was looking to expand a market-proven product to serve a growing customer base while also enabling the development team to introduce new features more swiftly.

After a careful analysis of the existing codebase and infrastructure, I recommended and executed a redesign of the platform, leveraging AWS services to achieve the desired level of performance, security and scalability.

✔️ Documented the business domain and mapping out use cases, in close collaboration with the company's CEO and a team of three developers

✔️ Redesigned the platform with AWS, EKS, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, and CloudFormation

✔️ Supported the dev team with K8 knowledge, code reviews, development & observability best practices

✔️ Decreased delivery time to less than 3 minutes by introducing CI/CD pipelines in GitHub actions 

Skills: Amazon EKS · docker · Requirements Analysis · Technical Solution Design · Solution Architecture · REST API · Amazon SQS · Amazon Web Services (AWS)

07/2021 - 08/2023
Senior Software Engineer / Feature Lead
Bolt.eu (Internet and Information Technology)

Worked for the Delivery vertical (Food and Market) of the largest micro-mobility provider in Europe, in an agile autonomous team of 5 developers; I was responsible for leading the development of new features, from idea to positive execution, from architecting to developing and deploying, using cloud-native technologies.
I collaborated with key stakeholders on scoping features to determine how to scalably design backend systems and APIs to meet their needs while working closely with the Product team to slice and dice scope and deliver piece by piece. I also contributed with ideas and constructive feedback to the product development roadmap.
Key achievements
✓ Automatic Adjustments - saved hundreds of hours per month of customer-support work by designing a scalable solution that spans multiple micro-services whose purpose was to automatically detect and propagate discrepancies between the checked-out carts and the delivered orders
✓ Delivery Methods - increased flexibility for end-users, allowing them to choose between multiple delivery methods that better fit their needs by supporting mobile-apps teams with scalable & backward-compatible backend APIs extension
✓ Internal Tools - saved several hours of engineering support per month and boosted the productivity of a monitoring dashboard by carefully augmenting it with relevant contextual data fetched from multiple services

Skills TypeScript Node.js Express React.js Redux MySQL Kafka AWS ElasticCache(Redis) EC2 SQS Microservices

01/2018 - 06/2021
Senior Software Engineer
Kambi

Worked for a leading B2B sports betting platform provider of premium sports betting technology and services, I was responsible for evolving microservices, and internal tools to accommodate new sports and bet offers while increasing trading productivity and automation, with a strong focus on scalability and monitoring.

I was part of 3-6 members self-organizing agile teams, facilitating scrum ceremonies on a rotation basis. Key achievements

✓ New Offer Generator - reduced complexity of existing integrations by introducing a new microservice responsible for specialized player-offer generator. I was involved in architectural discussions and leading the API design of REST endpoints and Kafka topics schemas and the integration with existing systems

✓ Kafka Feeds - improved the extensibility and speed of accommodating new bet offers type by migrating a system that was ingesting external games-statistics data from a REST approach to a decoupled Kafka topics based integration

✓ Centralized Configuration - improved trading productivity by designing and developing radical updates of a full-stack internal application whose purpose was to centralize the configuration of trading tools

✓ Performance Improvements - fixed performance issues causing delays by carefully monitoring metrics from browser and server perspectives, correlating them together, and identifying the bottlenecks

Skills Java RxJava SpringBoot Vert.x PostgreSQL TypeScript React.js Redux Cypress ELK Kafka


04/2016 - 01/2018
Senior Application Developer
IBM

As a member of IBM Client Innovation Centre Romania, working for a leading German automotive financial services provider, I was responsible for the entire SDLC, starting with analyzing customer input, proposing technical solutions, and ultimately implementing them and providing support for production rollout.

I was also responsible for guiding, mentoring, and onboarding developers.

Key achievements

✓ Market Specific Calculators - implemented a new service designed to offer various financial plans calculators for French and Spain markets

✓ Reducing Technical Debt - optimized the migration to new JavaEE application containers (Payara 4.0) by proactively investigating potential compatibility and performance issues

Skills Java JavaScript Payara JaxRS JPQS Oracle Database


08/2012 - 02/2016
Senior Software Engineer
Alibaba Group (Vendio Services, 11Main, OpenSky)

# Seller Tools & Growth Teams

I was responsible for designing and implementing scalable integrations with shopping, and retargeting platforms and e- commerce modules for interfacing product data feeds and integrating them into a new platform.

I was also involved in cloud migrations of on-premise applications.

Key achievements

Retargeting Automation - contributed to the platform's seller success by designing and implementing a system that automatically synchronized products updates to platforms like Google and AdRoll through bulk data feeds and real-time API updates

✓ Product Import Automation - contributed to an adoption increase of a brand-new e-commerce platform by designing and implementing a system that automatically synchronized product & inventory data from multiple marketplaces

✓ HTML Cleaner - reduced several hours of manual work per account needed to review and optimize product descriptions for a curated marketplace by designing an HTML cleaner system extensible with custom rules

Skills: Java Spring Node.js Express.js ActiveMQ AWS SQS SNS


# Platform Team

I worked on centralized libraries and participated in discovering, implementing, and disseminating new technologies.

Key achievements

✓ Node.js ActiveMQ-cpp The platform I was working for needed to integrate new Node.js services through an existing JMS-based infrastructure heavily used by other services. The npm repository was missing a production-ready, bullet- proof JMS client. I fixed this integration gap by writing a Node.js native wrapper for the ActiveMQ-CPP client library

Skills: Java Node.js Express.js ActiveMQ AWS SQS SNS


# Inventory Team

I worked on the Vendio SaaS multi-channel e-commerce platform, and I was, responsible for the development of new features for inventory management and listing.

Skills: Java JavaEE Spring Hibernate MySQL


03/2012 - 07/2012
Internship
Adobe

Adobe Romania Graduate Diploma Project 2012.
Worked with experimental CSS Custom Filters (aka CSS Shaders) applications for Digital Publishing.

Certifications

AWS Certified Clould Practitioner
2023

Local Availability

Only available for remote work
I'm interested in full-remote collaborations. I'm open to occasional business travelling (3-6 times/year).
Profileimage by Ionut Baranga Hands-On Tech Lead / Solution Architect from Bucharest Hands-On Tech Lead / Solution Architect
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