Backend Engineer · United Kingdom

Distributed systems fail in interesting ways. I build them to fail boringly.

I'm Sev, a Java backend engineer. I design and ship Spring Boot microservices on AWS and Kubernetes, with Kafka and PostgreSQL doing the heavy lifting underneath.

Contact me → LinkedIn GitHub

zsh · ~/sev

$ curl -s api.sev.dev/v1/profile | jq
{
  "name": "Seweryn Michota",
  "role": "Backend Engineer",
  "language": "Java",
  "patterns": [
    "outbox", "saga",
    "CQRS", "distributed locks"
  ],
  "runtime": "AWS + Kubernetes",
  "status": "open to conversations"
}
$ 200 OK · 12ms

Illustrative response · not a real endpoint

01 · Focus

Backend services that stay correct under load, retries and partial failure.

Most of my work lives in the space between services: messages, transactions, and what happens when one of them goes missing.

Microservices

Spring Boot services with clear boundaries, including reactive APIs on WebFlux where throughput matters.

Event-driven design

Kafka pipelines built on outbox, saga and CQRS, so data stays consistent across services without distributed transactions.

Cloud native

Deployments on Kubernetes with Helm, and AWS services like S3, Lambda and Bedrock wired in where they fit.

02 · Stack

The tools I reach for every day.

Language

Java
Spring Boot
Spring WebFlux
Python

Data

PostgreSQL
Apache Kafka
Amazon S3

Platform

AWS
Kubernetes
Helm
AWS Lambda

AI / ML

AWS Bedrock
Neural networks
Classical ML

03 · Background

Two careers, one habit: getting it right when it's busy.

Before software I spent seventeen years in professional kitchens. Production pressure isn't new to me. It just has better logging now.

Now

Backend Engineer

Java · Distributed systems

Building and running microservices end to end, from API design and messaging to deployment and observability.

Education

MSc Advanced Computing

Birkbeck, University of London

Distributed systems, machine learning and data analytics, with a solid grounding in statistics.

Education

BSc Information Systems and Management

Birkbeck, University of London · First Class Honours

Software development, databases and systems analysis, alongside how technology serves the business around it.

17 years

Head Chef

Professional kitchens

Ran teams through hundreds of covers a night. Taught me throughput, prioritisation and staying calm when the queue backs up.

04 · Projects

Things I build to learn, and to show my work.

Open source · Tutorial

Neural networks in Python

A from-scratch walkthrough of neural networks, written to make the maths behind deep learning approachable for engineers.

PythonNumPyDeep learning

View on GitHub → Portfolio · In progress

Voice-driven invoicing

Speak an invoice, get it issued. A voice-activated service that turns spoken requests into invoices through a third-party invoicing API.

JavaSpring BootSpeech to textREST

Let's talk backend.

Open to interesting problems, collaborations and a good conversation about event-driven architecture.

in/seweryn-michota-aa6870346LinkedIn smicho01GitHub