reachdev .io /alex
$ cat reachdev.io/alex
Alex Reachdev

Alex Reachdev

Staff Backend Engineer

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Availability · visible to company accounts
README.bio

I've spent the last decade building distributed systems that process payments, stream audio, and run financial infrastructure at scale. I write Go and Rust for the hard problems, and PostgreSQL for everything else. Currently open to staff/principal contracts — especially fintech, dev tooling, or infra.

experience/
Meridian Payments
Staff Engineer — Core Infrastructure · 2021 — 2024

Led migration of the payment routing layer from a Ruby monolith to a Go service handling 40k req/s. Reduced p99 latency from 180ms to 22ms. Owned on-call for EMEA payouts.

Volta Bank
Senior Backend Engineer · 2018 — 2021

Built the real-time transaction pipeline in Kotlin and Kafka. Introduced distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry across 30+ services, cutting mean time-to-diagnose from 40min to 4min.

Waveform
Software Engineer — Data Infrastructure · 2014 — 2018

Maintained a Hadoop/Spark pipeline ingesting 8TB/day of audio events. Led the migration from on-prem to AWS while maintaining 99.9% SLA throughout.

stack.json
GoRustPostgreSQLKubernetesgRPCRedisKafkaAWSTerraformDockerTypeScriptLinux
11 years · backend
projects/
~/pgmq-go

Lightweight Go client for PostgreSQL-backed message queues. Zero external dependencies, SKIP LOCKED for at-least-once delivery, dead-letter support. 600+ GitHub stars.

~/kube-cost

CLI that analyses Kubernetes resource requests vs actual usage and estimates monthly cloud cost per namespace. Built for internal use, later open-sourced.

~/raft-lite

Minimal, annotated Raft consensus implementation in Go. Used as reference material in a distributed systems course at TU Delft.