What I build

+15 years building data-intensive PHP/Laravel applications and APIs

  • Queue-heavy pipelines: ingestion, enrichment, and fault-tolerant background processing designed to stay correct and fast under load.
  • Third-party integrations: resilient bridges to external systems, from clean REST to legacy SOAP/XML.
  • Database performance at scale: indexing, query tuning, and caching. No more slow endpoints.
  • Owned end to end: domain-driven and test-disciplined, comfortable down through Docker, Ansible, and CI/CD.

How I work

A well-knit team ships faster and better. Most of what I care about is in service of that.

  • Software Engineering is a team sport: Support and trust are the foundations for great work, therefore I truly believe in lifting the people around me.
  • Shared understanding comes first: I lean on small, focused PRs and clear domain boundaries (DDD) so reviews become a conversation.
  • Build and test what matters: Business use-case-driven testing over coverage-chasing: tests must document behaviour to catch real regressions.
  • Incidents are for learning, not blame: A no-drama culture lets people move fast without fear, motivated, maximising their creativity.

Experience

Senior Fullstack Engineer — Finstack

Jun 2024 – Dec 2025

A high-volume data-synchronisation and financial-consolidation platform: a PHP/Laravel API backend powering a Vue 3 SPA. My focus was the backend and its reliability under real transaction volume. Some highlights:

  • Set up API telemetry and observability in production: extended Telescope to store request and query metrics asynchronously, so measuring the platform stopped costing it performance.
  • Redesigned the background-job queue architecture: splitting queues by priority and domain and tuning worker concurrency, which cut frequent write-contention deadlocks and the costly full-data refreshes they triggered.
  • Traced N+1 queries and bottlenecks to heavily over-indexed core tables and cut load time 30–50% on affected endpoints through targeted raw-query optimisation.
  • Built a third-party payroll integration (thin REST over a legacy SOAP/XML system) that unlocked a full expense-reporting loop and gave decision-makers granular expense visibility.
  • Built internal analytics dashboards over product usage data (onboarding funnel milestones, per-organisation login activity) so sales and marketing could read activation and retention themselves.
  • Improved OAuth authentication flows and applied security hardening across the platform.
  • Progressively refactored toward clear domain separation and explicit boundaries (Domain-Driven Design).

Also: Vue 3 / TypeScript SPA work (Pinia, TanStack Query).

Senior Software Engineer — The Next Web (TNW)

Oct 2015 – Apr 2024

Data-intensive Laravel services for a major European tech-media brand and its flagship conference. Co-owned several production systems after the brand's acquisition by the Financial Times in 2019, and ran second-stage technical interviews. Most relevant projects:

  • Index — startup-intelligence aggregator: Real-time pipelines enriching ~100K company profiles from a ~100-posts/second funding-news stream, using Redis queues, dedicated workers, and Elasticsearch. The matchmaking tool it fed served 8–10K attendees and facilitated 500+ startup↔investor meetings at a top-tier EU tech conference.
  • Conference platform: Ticketing, scheduling, and attendee accounts for a 8–10K-attendee/day event.
  • High-traffic news platform: Kept a site peaking at ~5M monthly visitors fast and resilient with a Redis caching layer serving 95%+ of traffic, avoiding outages during viral spikes.
  • Articles API: Bridged a WordPress editorial backend to a headless CraftCMS front end via a queue-driven API (Cloudflare, heavy third-party integration).
  • OAuth SSO API: Single sign-on across the web products and the conference mobile app — ~30K users.

PHP Developer & Freelancer

2007 – 2015

WordPress development, scientific-web tooling (Scimago Lab), and agency work

AI journey

Since late 2025 I've gone deep on agentic engineering, building the tooling that lets one engineer operate across the whole software lifecycle in depth:

  • A model-agnostic agentic harness I build and continuously refine: custom per-project skills and commands, persistent agent memory, and multi-agent orchestration.
  • Agent-driven CI/CD wired into my own GitLab pipelines.
  • Currently exploring skill and harness evals, with Claude and Kimi

Projects

Self-hosted Homelab

Docker · GitLab CI/CD · Ansible

Dockerised services on a Raspberry Pi: DNS, GitLab with CI/CD, kanban boards, backups, and monitoring.

Brokerage-aggregation platform

Laravel · Inertia + Vue 3

Consolidates multi-broker financial data: daily data sync of transactions and positions, dividend accounting, and position rebalancing over multiple accounts in one place. In daily production use by a US-based private wealth-management family office (under NDA).

Education

BSc Computer Engineering

Universidad de Almería · 2011 – 2015

Grado en Ingeniería Informática. Specialisation in Information Systems, final-year project on machine learning applied to real-estate price prediction.

English (professional, C1) · Spanish (native) · Dutch (basic)

Contact

Available for senior backend work (PHP/Laravel) — permanent or freelance, Amsterdam or remote. Happy to talk!