I am Mihira, a senior backend engineer based in Barcelona, with sixteen years of experience on production systems - hotel search at Amadeus, and health-data pipelines at Thryve. I take on Java and database work where correctness and operability matter more than the framework of the month.
Spring Boot services that have to talk to each other and stay correct when one of them is down. Service boundaries, API contracts, messaging and retries, and the unglamorous work of making a codebase safe to change.
Schema design that does not fight the engine, migrations that run without downtime, and tracking down the query that is costing you a page load. Relational, document or columnar: the engine matters less than modelling for the way it actually works.
Eight years at Thryve on the engine behind a wearable-data API: OAuth token lifecycles across hundreds of integrations, webhooks that trigger a fetch, and continuous streams harmonised into one schema. A 500,000-participant study ran on it.
Measuring before changing. Profiling, query plans, and core-dump analysis. The habit comes from years on a C++ search engine serving 800,000 hotels, and from keeping a health-data ingestion pipeline fast at Thryve as the volume kept climbing.
Rootless Podman, systemd units, nginx and Let's Encrypt on plain Linux hosts. No managed platform required, no vendor to be locked into.
A team of ten at Amadeus, where I had also built the Finnair website. By the end I was the most senior engineer on it, and covered the lead role while the position sat unfilled: architecture, planning, delivery and mentoring, alongside the code. Never a title, just the work that needed doing.
Small scope first. I would rather start with a two-week piece of real work than a long discovery phase. It tells everyone far more about whether the fit is right.
I work in the open with the people I work with: short written updates, code in the repository from day one, and no handover document that only makes sense to me. If I move on, the team should be able to keep going without a call.
Based in Barcelona, working remotely across the EU, in Portuguese, English, French or Spanish.
About a role, a system that needs building or fixing, or just the work itself. I read every message myself.
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