Vicente Valdés Pico

Leveraging my experience in backend architecture, I find myself leading a major technology

overhaul in a financial sector application. My role as Lead Backend Architect is a key part of

transitioning our system from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, improving both

scalability and maintainability. My focus is on the integration of Domain Oriented Design within a Hexagonal Architecture, ensuring that our systems are robust and adaptable. Key to this transformation is the renewal of our CI/CD pipeline, where we have introduced Docker and Kubernetes to streamline deployment processes. And the separation of responsibilities between model and adapters.

I am also leading a critical upgrade of our backend technology stack, to use Spring Boot, JOOQ, Liquibase, Lombok, Postgre, Kafka, OpenAI and Gradle. An important aspect of my role is overseeing the API redesign, adopting OpenAPI standards to ensure consistent development and communication.

Building upon the rich experiences and skills acquired during my tenure at Accenture, and to give continuity to the project, as Avaloq was to terminate its contract with Accenture. I made the decision to take the next step in my career journey. Recognizing the invaluable insights I gained from working closely with the client, I decided to transition to an internal role at Avaloq, a company dedicated to building innovative banking software solutions.

In this new role, my mission is to contribute my leadership expertise directly to Avaloq's technology initiatives focused on backend, further enhancing my commitment to their vision of revolutionizing the banking software landscape.

These bullet points reflect a concise summary of my main key contributions to the project:

● Develop software, leveraging on a broad and deep knowledge of the technologies and

code. Hands-on with code/infrastructure, technical discussions with clients and partners,

etc.

● Establishing coding and design patterns and being responsible for every line of code and

every significant change. Responsible for the non-functional aspects (adherence to

standards, quality, and non-functional requirements).

● Align and exchange with the architect to understand architecturals guidelines, policies and

patterns. Ensuring the team stays within given architectural guidelines.

● Guide and coach DEVs (incl externals). Being responsible for the team and also ensure

education of developers, testers (for automation), and DevOps (for code/automation) when

it comes to architectural policies and patterns

● Mentor for developers, externals (mediator on technical discussions and support team in

emergencies)

● Revert back to DA if architectural decisions are needed and make sure that architectural

patterns get defined

● Proactively introduce and advertise topics relevant to a broader development community.

Shaping and contributing to coding guidelines

Since the beginning I got the challenge to form/manage and lead a development team to help animportant software fintech company, their main office is in Zurich but has others around the world.

The first idea was that the whole team was located in this office (Alicante) but after COVID situation this idea changed and actually we are working remotely from different Spanish regions. To achieve that we use MS Office suit (Teams, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, ...), the whole Altassian stuck (Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, ...) and Citrix (for VDI machines). This gives the possibility to maintain all information accessible from any place around the world.

This company is involved in a full technology transformation of all of their products, which is a really exciting challenge. In our case, we are working on a project to create a kind of CRM dedicated to providing all daily relevant information to bank relation managers. How do we do? What technologies do we use?

On the front side we use Angular, Nest.js, Angular Material, Bootstrap and VisualStudio code as an IDE. Our backend is implemented with microservices architecture developed with Java 11 with SpringBoot, JPA, Hibernate, H2 DB for local test and Oracle DB in production mode, for the API REST definitions we use OpenAPI, for unit testing Mockito, to maintain DB model Liquidbase, for integrations and performances test we Scala+Gatling, gradle to maintain and build the project and IntelliJ as an IDE. Kafka to communicate and sync data between services. As an orchestration kubernetes system we use OpenShift from RedHat and Jenkins for CI/CD. All this mixed with an agile methodology (Scrumban).

This project is developed by 2 different teams, one in Zurich (15) and other in Spain (9). The

Spanish one is 100% remote and in Zurich they have a hybrid mode. I assumed the leadership of the Spanish one which includes being in direct touch with POs, BAs and client Architect to plan all together next iterations.