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Nicolás Andrade

Nicolás Andrade

Senior Backend Developer — Distributed Systems, Platform Reliability & Domain Design

Montréal, Québec, CA
+1 438-821-6426
English, Français, Español

Background


About

About

Senior backend developer with 15+ years building and evolving production systems.
Focused on reliability, domain-driven architecture, and raising engineering standards through disciplined testing, static analysis and metrics-driven decision making.
Experienced in cross-team technical and product alignment, incident ownership, and long-term system design in distributed environments.

Work Experience

Work Experience

  • Senior Back-End Software DeveloperRoofr

    Apr, 2023 - Present

    Senior backend engineer contributing to core domain services, with an emphasis on architectural clarity, reliability, and engineering standards across production systems.

    • Contributed to core backend domain services with a focus on reliability, safe change management, and long-term maintainability.

    • Introduced stricter pre-merge validation gates (static analysis, enforced test suites, custom PhpStan rules), reducing regression risk and increasing engineering accountability across services.

    • Standardized local development workflows to reduce environment drift and improve confidence in pre-merge validation and onboarding.

    • Led architectural transition from ORM-coupled models (CycleORM) toward repository-based domain boundaries, improving decoupling, testability, and long-term system flexibility.

    • Drove cross-team alignment on authorization patterns through reusable policies and typed DTOs, clarifying access boundaries and reducing duplication.

    • Led post-incident analyses for production issues, identifying root causes and driving preventative changes to reduce recurrence.

    • Authored and supported RFCs to improve engineering standards, development workflows, and architectural consistency across teams.

  • Senior Full-stack Software Developer / Tech Lead (Pricing Domain)SSENSE

    Nov, 2017 - Jan, 20235 years 2 months

    Led the Pricing domain to improve correctness, performance, and availability of global price calculation and related services.

    • Led the Pricing domain team, guiding feature exploration, technical design, and delivery with a focus on scalability and operational safety.

    • Modernized parts of a legacy monolith by extracting capabilities into cloud-native services.

    • Built an eventually-consistent framework for near real-time per-product aggregates from multiple data sources, minimizing incremental effort for new aggregate types.

    • Designed and deployed a Slack integration to query real-time product information (price, stock, description, discounts) from internal systems.

    • Owned incident response and post-incident reporting for production services, defining mitigation strategies and preventative actions.

    • Contributed to engineering standards through code reviews, coaching, and participation in hiring (interviews + debriefs).

  • Lead Code Auditor (Internal Product Security Team), MindGeek

    Feb, 2017 - Nov, 20179 months

    Tech lead for internal product security reviews and security engineering guidance across teams.

    • Reviewed internal applications to identify security weaknesses, bugs, exploit paths, and violations of secure coding standards.

    • Provided technical guidance to security analysts and engineering teams; contributed to security awareness trainings for new hires.

    • Triaged bug-bounty submissions, assessed impact, and coordinated follow-ups with engineering and infrastructure stakeholders.

  • Tech Lead / Senior Software Developer, MindGeek

    Oct, 2010 - Feb, 20176 years 4 months

    Led teams and services across multiple products; later worked on a high-traffic advertising platform improving CMS and analytics capabilities.

    • Led a team of ~7 developers across multiple projects; served as the interface between frontend, backend, and product stakeholders.

    • Redesigned and consolidated inherited codebases to reduce duplication and improve maintainability across multiple services.

    • Designed a framework to unify multiple domains into a single backend codebase, reducing development and maintenance overhead.

    • Improved performance and reliability by identifying bottlenecks, tuning systems, and supporting production operations.

    • Participated in hiring by running technical interviews and contributing to debrief sessions.

Projects Experience

Projects Experience

  • Serverless-offline-lambda-docker

    - Present

    Serverless plugin enabling local development with Serverless Offline while deploying AWS Lambda as Docker images via CloudFormation, to keep local/dev/prod behavior closer and reduce friction.

    • Improved local development ergonomics for teams using Lambda container images.

    • Focused on transparent developer experience: same workflow locally and in AWS.

  • Cachier (bug fix contribution)

    - Present

    Contributed a backwards-compatible fix for a bug that could lead to deadlocks under certain conditions, implemented as an opt-in behavior for users.

    • Bug fix with careful backwards-compatibility considerations.

  • S3rver (bug fix contribution)

    - Present

    Fixed an issue with improper handling of HTTP Range requests, which caused downstream failures for clients relying on correct partial-content behavior.

    • Improved protocol correctness for local S3-compatible development tooling.

  • Serverless-step-functions-local-docker

    - Present

    Fixed configuration behavior so the stage is resolved from provider configuration and falls back to legacy values when required.

    • More robust configuration resolution while preserving legacy compatibility.

Skills

Skills

  • Backend Engineering

    High-traffic systems

    Event-driven architecture

    CQRS

    API design

    Performance optimization

    Reliability & operations

    Incident response

    Post-incident analysis

  • Languages

    PHP (7.1-8+)

    TypeScript

    JavaScript

    Node.js

    Python (3.8+)

  • Frameworks & Patterns

    Laravel

    MVC

    DDD-style boundaries

    Unit & integration testing

    CI/CD

  • Data

    PostgreSQL

    MySQL

    Redis

    MongoDB

    DocumentDB

    DynamoDB

    ElasticSearch

    Materialized views

    Replication & sharding (concepts)

    Query optimization

  • Cloud & Infrastructure

    AWS (IAM, S3, SQS, SNS, API Gateway, Step Functions)

    Kubernetes

    EKS

    Docker

    CloudWatch

    Serverless

  • Quality & Delivery

    CI/CD

    GitHub Actions

    Static analysis (PHPStan)

    Code style (PhpCsFixer)

    Jenkins

    SonarQube

    Trunk-based development

    GitFlow

  • Observability & Incident Tooling

    Sentry

    Datadog (APM/Logs)

    NewRelic

    PagerDuty

    CloudWatch

Awards

Awards

  • Empowering Our People Ambassador , SSENSE

    Awarded on:

    Nominated by colleagues.

Interests

Interests

  • Home Automation

    HomeAssistantDockerWireGuardZigbee