David García Álvarez
Staff Backend Software Engineer
Madrid, Spain
Backend engineer with over a decade of experience designing and operating high-throughput cloud platforms across e-commerce, fintech, and telecom. Comfortable from greenfield architecture to deep production firefighting. Strong believer in observability, automation, and keeping systems boring in the best possible way.
Career
Experience
JOOR
Staff Backend Software Engineer
Acting as a core Platform & Staff Backend Engineer on a global B2B fashion e-commerce platform connecting thousands of brands and retailers. Drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and own critical platform services. Deep focus on reliability, performance, and cloud cost efficiency.
Highlights
- Spearheaded major FinOps optimizations, cutting AWS monthly spend by 50% ($80k to $40k) while improving latency and overall customer experience through deep architectural refinements.
- Overhauled observability architecture and reduced Datadog costs by 75% ($24k to $6k/month) by redesigning metrics and logging pipelines while strengthening APM, health checks, and incident detection.
- Architected high-throughput core integrations, including a robust Shopify synchronization engine, and standardized interoperability across Python, Node.js, and PHP services via REST, GraphQL, and gRPC.
- Scaled asynchronous processing for business-critical workloads by optimizing Celery worker topologies and Redis-backed queues, while hardening operations around credential handling, image pinning, and local ingress defaults.
Smart Protection
Staff Backend Software Engineer
Built and operated a large-scale distributed crawler platform for brand protection and digital asset monitoring across the open web. Architected serverless and event-driven pipelines handling millions of daily crawl jobs with high resilience.
Highlights
- Scaled platform throughput by 100% (2x crawling volume) with no infrastructure cost increase by aggressively optimizing AWS usage and observability resource allocation.
- Engineered real-time monitoring from scratch across 100+ e-commerce stores, achieving sub-minute detection of broken crawlers and significantly improving data freshness and reliability.
- Partnered with Data Analytics to refactor the automated analysis pipeline, cutting processing times by 50% and decoupling the architecture to enable plug-and-play integration of new ML models.
- Redesigned the distributed crawler core into a generic, maintainable framework, reducing technical debt and accelerating time-to-market for onboarding new scraping targets.
Tuenti
Backend Software Engineer
Developed and maintained backend services powering Tuenti's telecom product. Worked across polyglot microservices with a strong emphasis on observability, reliability engineering, and zero-downtime deployments on Kubernetes.
Highlights
- Led company-wide GDPR technical integration by architecting and building the central orchestration service for automated user data collection and secure right-to-be-forgotten deletion workflows across platform domains.
- Scaled CI/CD and Kubernetes delivery by engineering internal developer tooling that enabled reliable automated rollouts across 20+ clusters, reducing deployment friction and standardizing release operations.
- Strengthened core infrastructure reliability: Engineered comprehensive integration and fault-tolerance test suites for Tuenti's pre-existing internal distributed object storage (S3-like), successfully mitigating risks and ensuring the stability of the platform.
- Executed large-scale zero-downtime database cleanup initiatives to remove deprecated user data, optimizing storage footprint and risk exposure, while evolving internal Java/PHP frameworks used by product teams.
Beeva (BBVA Group)
Backend Software Engineer
Designed and built a DBaaS (Database as a Service) platform enabling automated provisioning of PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch instances via OpenStack. Exposed a unified multi-protocol access layer over gRPC — conceptually similar to Google Cloud Spanner.
Highlights
- Architected a DBaaS proxy platform from scratch: Initiated and developed a complex Go-based solution (conceptually similar to Google Cloud Spanner) deployed on OpenStack, bringing the core architecture to a highly mature state prior to my departure.
- Streamlined database provisioning & access: Designed HTTP and gRPC interfaces for automated PostgreSQL and Oracle creation. Built an SQL proxy layer that successfully eliminated the need for application-side database clients, drastically reducing maintenance overhead for development teams.
Beeva (BBVA Group)
Big Data Engineer
Productionized BBVA Data & Analytics machine learning projects including a banking transaction categorizer, a predictive alerts engine for spending patterns, and a sociodemographic comparator. Built end-to-end Spark pipelines on Cloudera.
Highlights
- Operated core banking ML products in production: Engineered and maintained the high-throughput transaction categorization engine (classifying millions of user expenses into spending categories) for BBVA's consumer-facing applications.
- Developed predictive analytics pipelines: Built end-to-end Spark data pipelines on Cloudera to power a banking transaction predictor, accurately forecasting upcoming user expenses and their expected amounts to improve personal financial management.
Sopra Steria
Backend Developer
Developed REST API services backing the new Sanitas (Spain's leading private health insurer) website and mobile application. Delivered clean, well-tested endpoints under a tight deadline and contributed to frontend architecture knowledge transfer.
Highlights
- Driven legacy-to-modern API migration: Analyzed legacy systems and executed the migration to a modern REST API architecture, serving as the unified backend for both the Sanitas website and mobile application.
- Rapid growth & architectural ownership: Quickly progressed in seniority, taking charge of critical architectural and security decisions, including the design and implementation of the cross-platform authentication system.
Toolkit
Skills & Expertise
Languages
Infrastructure
Databases
Observability
Practices
Background
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Specialization in Information Technologies. Awarded five academic honors. Electives included Computer Graphics, Automatic Systems Design, and Mobile Development.
Frontend Architecture Intensive Course
Sopra Steria
Course delivered by a frontend architect covering JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, SASS, NodeJS, and Angular — designed to bridge backend engineers to the frontend stack.
Cisco CCNA 1
Salesianos Atocha, Madrid
Official Cisco CCNA certification course.