I joined zezam to lead the Backend engineering team (2 people full-time + 2 part-time); the role involved setting up and evolving the team’s processes, notably:

• the implementation of a mostly async communication process, which gave engineers time to focus on development;
• establishing a weekly sync meeting to organize engineering efforts across the engineering teams (Frontend and Backend);
• supporting the company’s business by estimating feature complexity and suggesting alternatives or new features based on technical capabilities.

The company worked in fully remote fashion and, during my time there, pivoted through several business models:

1. providing a white-label, B2B application for managing fitness and welness studios;
2. a B2C SaaS offering of an e-commerce focused link-in-bio;
3. a B2C SaaS offering to make affiliate marketing more accessible for social media influencers.

My most notable technical contributions to the product were:

• an ordering system, which allowed both payment systems (PayPal and Stripe) as well as product types to be introduced as plugins;
• a subscription management system, based on Chargebee;
• an accounting ledger to track user earnings, as well as the batch processes to ingest the data from partner APIs.

I was the first Open Publishing hire for a newly founded team based in Faro, Portugal. As a team lead, I was responsible for:

• collaborating on HR matters related to the team (hiring, procuring office space, etc.);
• coaching team members in both technical areas and soft skills;
• being an individual contributor to both technical design and implementation.

I worked remotely for this role in the local team of 3 people, which was part of a larger team of 10 people, spread across 3 locations.

My contributions included:

• supporting some of the production infrastructure and almost all of the non-production one, including:
  • Elasticsearch clusters;
  • MySQL databases;
  • Docker Swarm Clusters;
  • Secret management and rotation (certificates and passwords);
  • User accounts;
  • Monitoring (Prometheus);
• developing and supporting Python-based services;
• bug fixing in the core C++ application;
• designing and implementing CD pipelines using Gitlab.