Available for consulting & fractional work

Paweł Sękara

Staff Software Engineer · Backend & Cloud Architecture

I help teams build highly scalable, high-throughput backend systems that stay fast, reliable and affordable at scale. 13+ years across Java, Kotlin and AWS - shipping services that handle millions of requests a day.

Kraków, Poland · remote-friendly 13+ years commercial experience English & Polish

Work with me

Consulting & advisory

Available for focused engagements - from a one-off architecture review to embedding with your team as a fractional staff engineer. I look for the biggest wins for the least effort.

Architecture & scalability reviews

Independent assessment of your backend and microservices design, with a prioritized plan to remove bottlenecks before they become incidents.

Performance & cost optimization

Profiling, capacity tuning and AWS cost reduction for high-throughput systems - measurable improvements in latency, throughput and monthly spend.

Backend & event-driven systems

Design and delivery of resilient services in Java & Kotlin - Spring Boot, Kafka pipelines, distributed scheduling, retries and fault tolerance.

Technical leadership & mentoring

Code reviews, engineering standards, and mentoring that levels up your team - helping engineers ship faster with more confidence.

About

Profile

Business-oriented, hands-on engineer who has spent his career making systems scale. I've worked across ad-tech, fintech payments and mobile - building the critical paths that thousands of users depend on. I like reducing complex problems to the change that actually moves the needle, then shipping it with the tests, observability and documentation to keep it running.

Career

Experience

A decade-plus building and scaling production systems - backend today, mobile earlier on.

Senior / Staff Backend Engineer · Commerce Media Tech (Voluum) Apr 2024 - Present

Driving the evolution, performance and reliability of Voluum - a leading ad-tracking and campaign-management platform used by thousands of marketers worldwide.

  • Build and maintain scalable backend services in Java & Kotlin with Spring Boot, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance in a microservices architecture.
  • Lead feature development and system optimizations across services handling millions of requests per day.
  • Deploy and operate workloads on AWS (bare EC2 and EKS), leveraging DynamoDB, RDS (MySQL/PostgreSQL) and ElastiCache (Redis) for performance and scale.
  • Improve observability and incident response through better metrics, logging and alerting.
  • Drive architectural decisions and long-term technical strategy; mentor engineers and lead code reviews.
JavaKotlinSpring BootAWS EKSDynamoDBRedisMySQL/PostgreSQL
Senior Java & Kotlin Backend Engineer · kevin. Sep 2022 - Apr 2024

Payments acceptance network, settlement and reconciliation services.

  • Optimized Kafka consumer throughput by introducing async event-processing mechanisms.
  • Built an in-house lightweight distributed scheduling & retry mechanism for the Ktor framework.
  • Led technical research underpinning the service's business development.
  • Mentored less-experienced developers and shared knowledge across the team.
KotlinJavaSpringKtorKafkaCockroachDBAWSGradle
Senior Java & Kotlin Backend Engineer · Codewise Jul 2018 - Aug 2022

Development and maintenance of an affiliate-marketing platform.

  • Microservices development with Spring Boot / Security / Data / MVC in Java & Kotlin.
  • Improved stability and availability of business-critical parts of the system.
  • Built secured infrastructure on AWS using Terraform; wrote integration & unit tests.
  • Conducted code reviews and mentoring.
JavaKotlinSpringAWSTerraformPostgreSQLDynamoDBCassandraDatadog
Senior iOS Engineer · Codewise Jul 2015 - Mar 2019
  • Developed the native Voluum and ZeroPark applications in Swift.
  • Created SDKs in Objective-C.
SwiftObjective-CiOS
iOS Engineer · ZineINC Dec 2013 - Jun 2015

Development and deployment of the native ZineINC application for iOS.

Mobile App Engineer & Team Lead · Codete Jul 2012 - Dec 2013
  • Developed various native iOS and Android applications.
  • Led the mobile developers team.

Toolbox

Skills

Languages & frameworks

JavaKotlinSpring / Spring BootKtorSwift

Data & messaging

KafkaMySQL / PostgreSQLDynamoDBRedisCassandraCockroachDB

Cloud & infrastructure

AWSEKS / KubernetesDockerTerraformLinuxNginx

Practices & tooling

MicroservicesObservability / DatadogCI/CD · JenkinsMaven / GradleGit

Education

Education

M.Sc. Computer Science
Jagiellonian University, Kraków
2013 - 2015
B.Sc. Computer Science
Jagiellonian University, Kraków
2010 - 2013

Courses

Certifications & courses

AWS Architect - Intermediate
Amazon Web Services
Communication is Your Work
Leaders Island
Emotional Intelligence
Leaders Island

Let's build something that scales

Have a system that needs to go faster, cost less, or handle more? I'd be glad to talk through it - no obligation.