About
I'm a backend engineer based in Amsterdam. For the last twenty years I've worked on the server side of consumer products — the APIs the apps talk to, the databases underneath, and the plumbing that carries data between systems that were never designed to know about each other.
Most of that has been on platforms where scale and correctness both matter: a crypto exchange, a fitness marketplace, a media streaming service, an online classifieds site. The domains differ wildly, but the hard parts rhyme — keeping things consistent under load, changing live systems without breaking them, and being able to tell whether something is actually working.
I've also spent a good part of my career leading teams as a technical lead and engineering manager, which is where I picked up the habit of writing things down. I care about clear design documentation and a real review culture roughly as much as I care about the code.
What I work on
Services and APIs
Building the backend services behind a product, the data models under them, and the contracts other teams depend on.
Event-driven systems
Moving data between services through message streams instead of direct calls — including the unglamorous parts: retries, failed messages, ordering, schema changes.
Infrastructure and deploys
Getting services onto containerised infrastructure and keeping releases boring: infrastructure defined as code, automated pipelines, migrations that don't need a maintenance window.
Observability
Instrumenting systems so the dashboards and alerts reflect what users are actually experiencing, and so whoever is on call has somewhere useful to look.
Automation and tooling
Turning slow, manual, error-prone processes into tooling the business can run itself, repeatably.
Leading and mentoring
Design docs, architecture review, knowledge sharing and growing the engineers around me — previously as a technical lead and engineering manager.
Core skills
| Area | Skills |
|---|---|
| Languages | TypeScript / Node.js, Kotlin, Java, PHP |
| Backend & APIs | gRPC & Protobuf, REST API design, microservices, Spring Boot, Laravel, DDD & Clean Architecture |
| Event streaming | Kafka (producers / consumers, dead-letter queues, ACLs, schema & topic governance), Debezium CDC |
| Data | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, LevelDB, Flyway migrations, query optimisation |
| Infrastructure | Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, Terraform, Spacelift, ArgoCD, AWS (Lambda, S3), GCP |
| Observability | Grafana, Prometheus / PromQL, SLO & SLI definition, metrics instrumentation |
CI/CD & auto-deploy pipelines, zero-downtime migrations, technical design docs, code review, Agile, cross-functional delivery.
Contact
linkedin.com/in/rkd
github.com/devrkd
devrkd.medium.com
Based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.