Backend Engineer & Consultant

Hi, I’m Maksym Ivanov.

I help teams design, build, and scale reliable backend services with Java, Spring, and AWS. From greenfield systems to complex platforms, I focus on resilient architecture, observability, and long-term maintainability.

Kraków, Poland Available for remote work

About

Backend engineering with a strong product and reliability mindset.

I’m a senior backend engineer with international experience delivering production systems for e-commerce, fulfilment, and large-scale travel platforms. I care about clear architecture, honest observability, and solutions that are easy to evolve, not just easy to ship.

Over the years I’ve owned features end-to-end: gathering requirements, doing technical discovery, designing APIs and data flows, implementing, testing, and supporting services in production.

I’m comfortable working hands-on in the codebase as well as leading cross-team initiatives, mentoring engineers, and aligning technical work with business outcomes.

Services

How I can help your team and product.

Backend Architecture & Development

Java · Spring · Microservices

  • Design and implementation of backend services and APIs.
  • Refactoring and re-architecting existing systems.
  • Aligning technical design with business needs.

Scalability & Reliability

AWS · ECS · S3 · DynamoDB · SNS · SQS

  • Design for high availability and resilience.
  • Capacity planning and performance tuning.
  • Cloud cost optimisation and scaling strategies.

Observability & Operations

Prometheus · Grafana · Kibana · CloudWatch

  • Metrics, logging, and tracing strategy.
  • Dashboards that surface real business signals.
  • On-call readiness and incident workflows.

Testing & Quality Engineering

JUnit · Spock · Gatling · Pact

  • Test strategy for backend services and integrations.
  • Contract testing between microservices.
  • Load and performance testing for critical flows.

Team Enablement

Mentoring · Technical leadership

  • Onboarding support for new engineers.
  • Improving engineering practices and tooling.
  • Workshops, documentation, and internal talks.

Experience & Selected Work

Recent areas where I’ve delivered impact.

Order fulfilment platform at scale

E-commerce & grocery fulfilment · Senior engineer

2019 — Present

Abstraction layer over picking, delivery, and e-commerce systems, orchestrating orders’ lifecycles across the platform.

  • Designed and delivered complex features for order lifecycle orchestration.
  • Re-architected microservices for scalability, testability, and clearer boundaries.
  • Introduced contract testing with Pact to stabilise integrations between services.
  • Defined metrics and dashboards (BigQuery, Prometheus, Grafana) to support data-driven decisions.
  • Cut operational and cloud costs via better data retention, logging and scaling policies.

Corporate travel booking backend

Travel technology platform · Backend & quality

2017 — 2019

Policy-driven REST API for shopping and booking corporate travel with custom branding.

  • Co-designed and implemented core API flows with robust unit and functional coverage.
  • Improved sustainability by replacing legacy components with modern, lightweight designs.
  • Promoted pair-programming, code reviews, and pragmatic Agile practices.
  • Provided on-call production support, closing the loop between code and real-world usage.

Test frameworks & quality foundations

Itinerary & expense platforms · QA & dev

2015 — 2017

Backend components for itinerary management and expense aggregation in corporate travel.

  • Built a test framework from scratch, including mocks, CI integration, and reporting.
  • Led QA processes, mentored team members, and contributed to feature development.
  • Helped teams move towards a more cross-functional, engineering-driven approach to quality.

Earlier experience

POS platforms · Support & QA

2012 — 2015

Support and testing for POS management solutions for wireless dealers.

  • Worked directly with users via phone, email, and chat to resolve issues.
  • Designed and executed manual tests, reported defects, and refined specifications with BAs and PMs.
  • Co-created documentation and tutorials used to onboard new team members and customers.

Education

Master of Electrical Engineering

National Technical University of Ukraine · Kyiv

September 2013 — March 2015

Bachelor of Electrical Engineering

National Technical University of Ukraine · Kyiv

September 2009 — June 2013

Contact

Tell me about your backend challenges.

Whether you need help with a new backend, modernising an existing system, or improving observability and reliability, I’m happy to talk. A short conversation is usually enough to see if I can help.