Staff Software Engineer, Architect Team at Mbanq
I design the backend systems that move money: ACH, wire transfers, card processing, and the banking platforms behind them.
I'm a Staff Software Engineer with more than six years in fintech, enterprise backend systems, and payment platforms. My work sits where scale, security, and money meet: designing services that stay fast under load, pass SOC 2 and PCI DSS scrutiny, and integrate cleanly with core banking.
Day to day that means Java and Spring Boot, Go services on AWS Lambda, relational databases, and event-driven microservices, plus the architecture reviews and mentoring that help a team ship complex financial products with confidence.
Outside the core platform I build end to end: Python Telegram bots and Mini Apps that run a business's daily operations, Next.js middleware in front of Apache Fineract for loan officers, and LLM-powered tools that turn messages into structured records. I hold a Master of Science in Computer Science from Westcliff University.
Most of the problems I get are ones where money, compliance, and uptime pull in different directions. I start by mapping how the system fails before deciding how it should work, then look for the smallest design that holds up under those failures, and I write the reasoning down so the team can challenge it.
What happens when a partner bank times out, a message arrives twice, or a node dies mid-transfer? Those answers shape the design more than the happy path does.
No database, no session, no extra service unless it earns its place. Less state means fewer ways to be wrong about money.
Services get exactly the permissions they need, and secrets and access are reviewed as part of the design, not after it.
When options are close, I build a small spike and measure it rather than argue from preference.
Consumers need to see their account and card status during a bank event, exactly when upstream systems are most likely to be degraded.
Designed a stateless Go service on AWS Lambda that queries core banking and card management in parallel and returns partial results when one side fails, with typed errors mapped to clear HTTP responses. No database and no session state means nothing to corrupt or migrate under pressure.
Authentication lived inside the core banking platform, so it scaled with the platform and every new channel needed its own login.
Proposed moving identity out into a centralized Keycloak service with OAuth2 and SSO, so the core can scale on its own and new apps get single sign-on, MFA, and role-based access without touching the core.
A middleware app was talking to a live lending core using a service account with super-user rights.
Inventoried every API the app actually calls and replaced super-user access with a dedicated role holding only the permissions those calls need, covering client and loan creation and repayments.
A chat-based bookkeeping bot was a single process on one host, so any restart meant missed sales and expense messages.
Reworked it into an active-passive pair with a clean hand-over, and put the LLM parser behind its own client interface so the model provider could be swapped without touching the bot logic.
Search over large PostgreSQL-backed datasets was slow and limited to exact matches.
Evaluated Elasticsearch and OpenSearch side by side against real queries, then integrated full-text search while keeping PostgreSQL as the source of truth.
Arranged the way a payments platform is built: from the business domain down to the infrastructure it runs on.
The money movement I build for
How the pieces fit together
Where customers and staff meet the system
Languages and frameworks I write in
Who gets in, and what they can do
Where records live and how they're found
Where it all runs
Across every layer: Technical leadership, Problem solving under constraints, Mentoring engineers, Design reviews, Scrum (PSM I), Working with AI coding agents, Cross-team delivery.
May 2023 – present
Before May 2023
Moving authentication out of the core platform into a centralized Keycloak identity service, for better scalability and single sign-on.
A stateless Go service on AWS Lambda that lets consumers check their account and card status during a bank event, fanning out to core banking and card management and returning partial results when one side is down.
Services for FedNow instant payments and ISO 20022 message handling, alongside webhook processing for sub-ledger balances.
Next.js middleware and mobile-friendly app in front of a microfinance lender's Fineract core: client search, loan creation, and repayments behind a least-privilege service role.
Attendance, shifts, leave, working days, and holiday rules for a multi-location business, run through Telegram bots and a Vue Mini App admin, with a layered Python backend.
A Telegram bot that reads sales and expense messages, parses them with an LLM into structured entries, and keeps running balances, deployed as an active-passive pair for uptime.
Planning how platform components move from AWS cloud infrastructure to on-premise environments without disrupting operations.
Implemented and evaluated Elasticsearch and OpenSearch alongside PostgreSQL-backed systems.