Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Helipagos
Role Summary
As CTO, I own the technical direction of Helipagos across infrastructure, backend architecture, DevOps, and team leadership. I inherited a system under stress and am executing a structured plan to stabilize, modernize, and scale it.
Key Contributions
- Database Performance Crisis: Diagnosed critical CPU saturation on our production PostgreSQL instance during peak payment hours. Identified three independent root causes: connection pool saturation from dozens of microservices with unconfigured HikariCP, full scans on high-volume transactional tables with missing composite indexes, and lock contention from concurrent external payment writes. Designed and am leading implementation of PgBouncer in transaction pooling mode, concurrent index creation, and a RabbitMQ + Spring Batch queue to decouple write-heavy endpoints.
- Microservice Consolidation: Reduced the service fleet significantly through architectural review, eliminating redundant services and applying JVM tuning and memory best practices — achieving 60% reduction in RAM consumption across the backend.
- Deployment Standardization: Applying the CI/CD pipeline model built for the payment button redesign across the full backend — replacing manual late-night deployments with automated, approval-gated pipelines using GitHub Actions and Ansible.
- Observability: Implemented Grafana, Loki, and Prometheus across services. Configuring database dashboards with CloudWatch integration and pg_stat_statements for slow query visibility.
- Team Leadership: Lead cross-functional teams across design, product ownership, and engineering — translating regulatory requirements and business goals into concrete technical roadmaps.
Technologies
Infrastructure: AWS (RDS, EC2, Lambda), Docker, Nginx, Linux
DevOps: GitHub Actions, Ansible, PgBouncer, RabbitMQ
Observability: Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, CloudWatch
Frameworks: Spring Boot, Quarkus, Angular
Languages: Java, Kotlin, TypeScript
Management: Jira, Google Workspace