Miguel Basire — Tech Lead, Backend & Distributed Systems

Stack

years of hands-on use

Functional Scala ecosystem

Typelevel Cats6y
Cats Effect6y
Play Framework7y
Akka / Pekko5y
Http4s4y
Fs24y
Anorm6y
Doobie2y

Core languages

Scala11y
Java10y
SQL14y
Kotlin5y
Swift4y
TypeScript2y
C#2y

Infrastructure & messaging

Kubernetes5y
Kafka4y
Redis4y
RabbitMQ1y

Data & search

PostgreSQL6y
Elasticsearch3y
Oracle5y
SQL Server3y
MySQL3y
Couchbase6mo

Mobile & reactive

RxSwift5y
RxJava5y
MVVM

Testing

ScalaTest6y
JUnit6y
ScalaCheck3y

Experience

2006 — 2026

Freelance Scala engineering

2020 — 2026

Jul 2025 — Apr 2026

backend(client = "StrangeBee / TheHive")

Senior Backend Engineer

TheHive is a collaborative security incident management platform used by SOC, CERT, and CSIRT teams. Its data layer is built on JanusGraph, a graph database backed by Cassandra for storage and Elasticsearch for indexing and search.

Identified a silo between my team and the Orchestrator team that was blocking product integration. Initiated and drove collaboration between both teams to deliver a demonstrable version, making the Orchestrator tangible to the business and unlocking buy-in.
Authored the ADR defining the Orchestrator authentication architecture and implemented the TheHive side: JWT signing via shared secret, with the Orchestrator user always tied to an existing TheHive user — ensuring authorization model consistency without introducing a parallel identity system.
Built the proxy relaying requests between the Orchestrator front module and its Go backend service, enabling seamless integration of Orchestrator into the TheHive product.
Led code reviews and mentored the team on functional programming, supporting the introduction of the Cats (Typelevel) library and upskilling the team on this paradigm.
Drove post-incident analysis (post-mortems) on TheHive, identifying root causes and associated corrective actions.
Represented the team in 3 Amigos scoping sessions, contributing to more reliable requirements definition ahead of development.

Scala
Play Framework
Pekko
JanusGraph
Elasticsearch
Cassandra
GCP

Oct 2023 — Jun 2025

backend(client = "Geodis / Digital Factory")

Senior Backend Engineer

Assignment within a team modernizing tools for Geodis sales teams. Built a pricing tool for sea and air freight between worldwide locations, backed by an internal carrier pricing API maintained by the same team, through to production launch.

Optimized automatic price filling on realistic volumes (~10,000 shipment requests per quote): rewrote costly SQL queries in both systems and added Fs2 flow control to prevent saturation of the pricing reference — reducing processing time from 30 minutes to a few minutes.
Optimized automatic validation of ~10,000 business consistency rules per quote — a first implementation had validated the concept but caused timeouts at real scale: rewrote poorly performing SQL queries, making processing reliable on production volumes.
Diagnosed high response times on the pricing reference API for specific client datasets: identified the influence of search criteria on performance, then optimized affected indexes and SQL queries.
Actively contributed to architecture decisions within a team of senior engineers, through backlog grooming, code reviews, and pair programming.

Scala
Http4s
Fs2
Cats Effect
Doobie
SQL Server
Azure

Aug 2022 — Sep 2023

backend(client = "Ingenico / SoftPOS")

Senior Backend Engineer

Joined the 10-person SoftPOS team building a PCI-certified Android SDK (Contactless Payments on COTS) securing cardholder data from a merchant Android application to the acquirer.

Led all technical decisions on the backend services (secure channel, monitoring) interfacing with the Android SDK, ensuring their availability and compliance for production launch.
Jointly with the SDK sub-team, reinforced the protobuf protocol linking the SDK to the backend services, improving its consistency, and exposed the endpoints required for cryptographic ceremonies.
Led the migration to a new cloud HSM (Futurex) following deprecation of the existing solution, ensuring end-to-end encryption of cardholder data in compliance with PCI requirements.
Adapted the cryptographic key provisioning APIs to strengthen security constraints while reducing failure risk during key ceremonies.
Identified an active polling anti-pattern on monitoring and attestation services causing delays incompatible with reliability requirements. Replaced with Kafka stream consumption on both services, ensuring near real-time detection and reaction.

Scala
Http4s
Fs2
Kubernetes
Helm
Kafka
Elasticsearch
GCP

Dec 2021 — Jul 2022

backend(client = "Le Figaro")

Senior Backend Engineer

Joined a self-organized team of four building Le Figaro's GraphQL API, aggregating content from the news website, mobile apps, and several specialized microservices.

Conducted code reviews and analyzed performance limits through Gatling load tests.
Cleaned up application packaging and configuration.
Tested and delivered performance improvements across the API.
Evolved the GraphQL schema to meet client needs.

TypeScript
GraphQL
Node.js
Docker
Kubernetes
Redis
MongoDB
Gatling

Apr 2021 — Dec 2021

backend(client = "Ingenico / PPaaS")

Senior Backend Engineer

Joined a nine-developer team on PPaaS, Ingenico/Worldline's payments-as-a-service platform, building the microservices behind its provisioning, reporting, and configuration APIs as the MVP approached launch.

Evolved the provisioning API, originally designed before the onboarding team existed, to meet its new use cases — notably adding a batch mode — as the onboarding team had become a key consumer.
Built new microservices to extend provisioning to payment terminal configuration, consistent with the established stack and patterns on the platform.
Supported the onboarding team, who lacked internal Kafka expertise, in consuming the platform's async queues, improving integration reliability between the two teams.
Developed a Ruby script leveraging the GitLab API and adapted workflows across ~20 microservices to streamline and simplify releases, validated with the DevOps team.

Scala
Http4s
Fs2
Kubernetes
Helm
Kafka
Couchbase
Elasticsearch
GCP

Oct 2020 — Apr 2021

backend(client = "Ledger")

Senior Backend Engineer

Supported a seven-person backend team on two B2B cryptocurrency account management projects.

Diagnosed and fixed a critical memory leak on the account tracking service, caused by the JNI connector linking the JVM to Ledger's embedded C++ library. Worked closely with the C++ library developer to trace, understand, and fix the issue.
Introduced an event-driven notification system (RabbitMQ) allowing service consumers to receive account updates as they happen, significantly reducing reliance on the API — previously costly in resources and a source of latency.
Contributed to the architecture of the LAMA project, aimed at replacing the legacy monolith with Scala microservices. Implemented the account synchronization service (Redis, gRPC, Fs2, protobuf), streaming blockchain updates in real time.

Scala
Doobie
Http4s
Fs2
Cats Effect
EKS
gRPC
RabbitMQ
PostgreSQL

Startup leadership

2014 — 2020

Jul 2014 — May 2020

lead(company = "QALYO", role = "Team Lead")

Team Lead

Technical lead at QALYO from its founding — a startup building a health assistant for patients. Full ownership of the technical solution and team operations; team size between 3 and 8 people over the years. QALYO supported two hospital departments (urology, orthopedics) in post-operative patient follow-up, with over 6,400 mobile app users.

Led health data hosting compliance (HDS), assembling the justification file for certified host Claranet. Later drove migration of this on-premise hosting to AWS, reducing production costs.
Drove adoption of Rx and the MVVM pattern to structure the iOS and Android apps, reducing divergence between both codebases and allowing developers to move more easily between them.
Developed features on the iOS and Android apps and associated backend services (authentication, synchronization, alerting), and built the web back-office for tracking hospitalized patients.
Recruited 8 people to the technical team, providing ongoing mentoring and support throughout their time on the project.
Established a Product Owner-free workflow where the entire technical team directly translated the founder's business needs into user stories, increasing team autonomy and ownership over the product.
Trained mobile developers, initially unfamiliar with automated testing, in TDD — resulting in a test suite ensuring critical business rules of the app are respected.
Supported the founder in pre-sales discussions with hospital healthcare professionals and insurers, to understand needs at source and relay them to the team for scoping.

Scala
Play Framework
Anorm
PostgreSQL
Akka
React
AWS
Kotlin
Swift
RxSwift
RxJava

Oct 2018 — Mar 2019 · concurrent with QALYO

teach(school = "INSA Centre Val de Loire")

Part-time Lecturer

Supported two first-year classes in learning object-oriented programming during hands-on lab sessions spread over a 6-month period.

C++
CMake
VS Code

› Earlier career

2006 — 2014 · 5 roles

Jan 2012 — Jun 2014

fullstack(client = "Transatel")

Full-stack / Lead Developer

Transatel is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). Joined an IT team of eight developers managing mobile line management and billing, supporting a Scrum team seeking to improve billing and provisioning chain performance and redefine the testing strategy.

Built new provisioning workflows and evolved the public provisioning API.
Adapted carrier connectors to protocol changes and integrated new CDR feeds.
Introduced dependency injection to clean up the codebase, and migrated an application to a JEE 7 container (WildFly).
Optimized batch processing performance and developed a "test mode" for M2M lines.
Developed a FluentLenium test suite for the back-office, and ran coding dojos to spread best practices across the team.
Replaced end-to-end business tests with isolated tests, significantly reducing build and failure analysis times — the resulting increase in code coverage enabled automated deployment.

JEE
Java
BPM
C#
IBM MQ
SQL Server
Jenkins

Oct 2011 — Dec 2011

backend(client = "Voyages-sncf.com")

Backend Engineer

Joined a 5-person team responsible for evolving the voyages-sncf.com itinerary calculation service, exposing a REST API for connection possibilities between two cities.

Added filters to existing REST APIs.
Integrated new feeds into the HAFAS engine.

JEE
Java
Oracle Data Integrator
Spring

Jan 2010 — Jul 2010

backend(client = "SCGIB")

Backend Engineer

Joined an 8-developer team providing services to the FX market front office, as part of a migration of existing Java services to C#, in a context requiring low latency specific to this domain.

Automated coverage of Spot operations.
Built a market price distributor, used notably by the pricing chain.
Developed the order executor.

Java
C#
TIBCO Rendezvous

Oct 2007 — Dec 2009

backend(client = "EDF")

Backend Engineer

Within the Publishing team (around ten people), developed the outgoing document archiving service, responsible for extracting and saving information from each document across potentially large batches. Contributed to industrializing the component development process.

Java
Bash

Jun 2006 — Sep 2007

backend(client = "ICDC, for CNP")

Backend Engineer

Joined a 4-person team responsible for maintaining investment reference systems for CNP, with the main task being optimization of daily data integration batch jobs.

C
Pro*C
Oracle
PL/SQL
Bash