VANJA

VANJAPETRESKI

Software Architect & Engineer

ABOUT ME

Born in Serbia, been travelling around the whole world - from Amazon basin in South America to Zen temples in Japan, settled down in beautiful Colombia. More than 15 years of working remotely, as a contractor, mostly on architecture and development of backend systems using Java, Kotlin and AWS (certified).

Proactive, efficient and pragmatic team leader with outstanding problem-solving, communication and organizational skills. Agile approach, trying to keep things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

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WHAT CAN I DO

Architecture

Passionate about system design, architecture and cloud.

Development

Enjoying getting hands dirty and learning new technologies.

Team Leading

Experience in team leading from small startups to Fortune 100 companies.

Project Management

Exceptional organizational skills, leaving no stone unturned.


Recommendations

I have had the pleasure of working with Vanja and I can confidently say that he is an amazing asset to any team. Vanja has a unique ability to move fast and efficiently, always staying ahead of the curve. He consistently identifies best ways to solve problems, making him an invaluable resource for any project. His deep understanding of the industry and his technical expertise have enabled him to develop creative and effective solutions time and time again.

Maciej Chmurski

Vanja is an excellent Software Architect and Technical Leader. We worked together on one of the most time-challenging projects in my career and I can confidently say that he was instrumental to the success of the project.

Ivan Yaschishin

Vanja is a brilliant technologist. His ability to manage projects and provide technical guidance to the team is a rare mix. He has been very instrumental in developing EIQ at RMS. He is extremely disciplined and delivers all his projects on time. His modules always have lowest bug count of all the product modules.

Srini Emani

Vanja is a great software architect and an instrumental team member of every project we worked on together. Besides the decades of experience and depth in computer science and software domains, his leadership skills and outgoing communication style are top-notch and valuable parts of his contributions. Happy to recommend him, as he would be a great leader and team member in any environment.

Ivan Starcevic

Vanja is the kind of engineer you want on your team. He works fast, is able to both better define and troubleshoot vague requirements given to him, is extremely self-directed, and communicates clearly, regularly and effectively. All of these qualities make a great remote team member and engineering lead.

Andrew Simone

Vanja was a great team leader and mentor. He is very concerned about the project he is in, and incredibly proactive, being everywhere at all times, a majestic ability of himself. Also, his entire knowledge pool is very wide, having knowledge about everything and the will to push that forward. A real pleasure!

Agustin Falco

I had the pleasure of working with Vanja on a recent project and can confidently say that as a product or project manager, he is the tech lead you want on your team. As a tech lead, Vanja's incredible work ethic, bias towards action, and technical expertise was evident immediately. From day 1 he quickly mastered a complex domain and was able to deliver results. Vanja leaves no stone unturned in ensuring that any gaps in requirements or unforeseen complexities are immediately brought to the teams attention. Vanja is also an excellent manager and effectively led a large, highly productive backend development team for our project. I would look forward to any opportunity to work with Vanja in the future.

Evan Hein

I was a product lead for a project that Vanja was on. This was my first project working with Vanja and we worked 100% remote from each other. I couldn't have asked for a better engineer to lead our project with as much knowledge, tenacity, and drive to see the product succeed and continually improve as we progressed from exploration to delivery of the product. I would work with Vanja again in a heartbeat and he would be a valuable asset to any team in need of a strong coder and architect.

Ian Saterdalen

Vanja delivers quality solutions, with ease and speed. During the time we've worked together, whenever I needed any help, he would provide any resource/explanations required to move tasks ahead. I've learned a lot from his code and work skills.

Diego Rodrigues Ferreira

Working together with Vanja was a real pleasure. He was a highly valued member of our team. Always looking for the best fit, would it be a specific technology, tool or practice to complete a task in the most elegant way. Vanja is dedicated, responsible, and intelligent person with problem-solving mindset. Every company would benefit from his talents.

Boris Zelenkapic

Vanja is pragmatic and solution-oriented person. In the same time, he is very passionate about the quality of the project he is working on, constantly trying to improve it. One more thing I admire is that he is very detailed in everything what he learns; his broad knowledge happened to be very valuable in many situations we had. Being a positive person and packed with skills, Vanja is one of the most pleasant co-worker I have been working with.

Igor Spasic

Vanja is an experienced programmer with young developers heart. He is eager and hungry to learn new technologies and apply them in every day work but at the same time very competent in core Java, Spring and big web systems architecture.

Robert Pallas

Vanja is very passionate about product improvements, introducing new development methods and investingating new technologies that are emerging. During our work together, he showed great dedication to the projects we were involved on. Although we worked together at the start of our careers, I am sure he kept his high stadards and passion for modern software development approach.

Milos Stoiljkovic

I had worked with Vanja at the beginning of my career. Things that I appreciated the most were his passion to follow best practices, new trends in IT, and agile approach in problem solving. I can always recommend Vanja as valuable team member, willing to share knowledge, who can also successfully cope with challenges of being team leader.

Miroslav Smiljanic

EXPERIENCE

Software Architect & Engineer - Vanja.io

2022 to Present

Remote contractor providing Software Engineering services - Java, Kotlin, AWS.

Solutions Architect & Lead Backend Engineer - Ancient Ritual

2022 to Present

Architecting and developing complete AWS infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, backend services, security and custom OS for Raspberry Pi for a wellness company that provides a vehicle to the deepest states of well-being through experiential health therapy. Tech stack: gRPC, REST, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Spring Security, Keycloak, CI/CD, DevOps, Open AI, AWS IoT, CloudFormation, ECS, Fargate, RDS, S3 and many others.

Principal Software Engineer - PortX

2021 to 2022

I was working on complex Microservices to integrate with Federal Reserve banking system and provide modern services and APIs to fintechs and banks. Some of the tech we used: Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Quarkus, Kubernetes, AWS.

Software Architect - Moody's Analytics

2019-2021

I was creating a set of tools, libraries, frameworks and standards to speed up new application development and maintain / align code consistency and way of doing things across applications and teams. Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, GraphQL, Docker, Kubernetes and AWS are some technologies we were using.

Principal Software Engineer - Nagarro

2019-2021

Nagarro is a software development and business consulting company, helping their clients to build technology that revolutionizes how customers use their products, trusted by the world’s top businesses including Google, AT&T, Twitter, Intel and many others. I was working 100% remotely for their clients as a senior software engineer and team leader.

Team Lead - RMS

2019-2021

Working remotely on the Risk Exposure Management backend system as a team lead. Focused on architecture, infrastructure and integration using Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes and GraphQL technologies supporting BigData with a billion records. Risk Management Solutions is the world's leading catastrophe risk modeling company. From earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods to terrorism and infectious diseases, RMS helps financial institutions and public agencies understand, quantify, and manage risk. They explore the unthinkable, enabling the risk management of even the most extreme events.

Software Architect - X-Team

2016-2018

X-Team is a group of extraordinary global freelancers who work with specialized teams from around the world, completely remotely. I was working with their client partners to help them code the future and also helping X-Team with their internal applications using React, Node.js, REST and AWS.

Software Architect - Riot Games

2016-2018

Riot Games is a video game developer, publisher, and eSports tournament organizer primarily known for League of Legends video game. I was working as a software architect and engineer of Riot Test application, extending Jira Server by writing Jira Java plugins, JavaScript and AWS. I was involved with architecture, development and infrastructure.

Senior Software Engineer - World Fuel Services

2016

Architecture, development and maintenance of multiple apps for Fortune 100 company, migration of JEE apps to Maven structure, architecture and development of backend REST apps and Microservices using Spring Boot, Hibernate, Docker and AWS. Architecture and development of frontend apps using Angular, TypeScript and Bootstrap.

Java Architect - Kindred Group

2011-2015

Working on Kindred's iGame brands as a Java Architect of the high load backend to support online gambling business, integration with payment and gaming providers and backoffice development. Extending Spring Boot, Hibernate and Maven. Microservices, PostgreSQL, BigData, monitoring application using Zabbix, JMX and New Relic, reporting, SQL writing, DevOps, responsible for best practices and involved in agile project management.

Senior Java Developer - IDC

2009-2011

Architecture and development of, Java based, comprehensive desktop terminal that integrates global real-time pricing information, news, research, key corporate actions and dividend data, plus sophisticated tools, including advanced charting and alert services. Developing custom Swing components and libraries, server-side components using JSP, Servlets, Spring and Ajax, responsible for performance optimization and security. Migrating big system to newer JDK and from Ant to Maven.

CEO - Oblac

2007-2009

CEO and engineer of the company handling multiple projects. Heroku-based web application for connecting employers and employees built with Spring, Hibernate, JPA, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, jQuery. Custom Java EE platform / framework based on Jodd, Spring and Hibernate. Development of custom web components for custom Rejoice framework using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, JSON, JSP. Designing and developing enterprise web application for factoring business using Rejoice framework. Upgrade of several e-banking Java web applications to modern technologies with Spring and Maven. Development of Asterisk Java Library, Swing application for integration of desktop terminals with Asterisk server and Asterisk call center web app.

Team Leader - Asseco Group

2006-2007

Designing, team leading and programming Transaction Management Information System for anti-money laundry for Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Serbia using the latest JEE and Oracle technologies like EJB3, MDB, JPA, Oracle AS, OC4J, JSF, ADF and JDeveloper. Deployment of production system in super computing environment. Managing development, repository and continuous integration platforms. Design, documentation and teaching about complete development lifecycle and methodologies. Introduction of Agile project management.

Java Developer - University of Belgrade, School of Electrical Engineering

2005-2006

Working on multiple Java projects at Computing Center of Electrical Engineering University. Information system using JSF, Oracle ADF, EJB, JPA and Oracle DB. Development of Java CPU Simulator based on Swing. Design and development of IMT algorithm for ultrasound image processing. Distributed Image Processing GRID system. Distributed systems and multi threading.


CERTIFICATION

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

2022

Earners of this certification have a comprehensive understanding of AWS services and technologies. They demonstrated the ability to build secure and robust solutions using architectural design principles based on customer requirements. Badge owners are able to strategically design well-architected distributed systems that are scalable, resilient, efficient, and fault-tolerant. [SHOW CREDENTIAL]

AWS Certified Developer – Associate

2022

Earners of this certification have a comprehensive understanding of application life-cycle management. They demonstrated proficiency in writing applications with AWS service APIs, AWS CLI, and SDKs; using containers; and deploying with a CI/CD pipeline. Badge owners are able to develop, deploy, and debug cloud-based applications that follow AWS best practices. [SHOW CREDENTIAL]

Kotlin Certification by Jetbrains & Coursera

2022

The Kotlin programming language is a modern language that gives you more power for your everyday tasks. Kotlin is concise, safe, pragmatic, and focused on interoperability with Java code. It can be used almost everywhere Java is used today: for server-side development, Android apps, and much more. Kotlin is 100% compatible with all existing Java frameworks, and has good tooling support. [SHOW CREDENTIAL]

AWS IoT Foundation Series

2022

Telemetry and Command & Control, help you sense the environment and act in the physical world. Predictive Maintenance and Fleet Management. The course provides you with the knowledge and skills required to overcome business challenges using AWS IoT Core and associated services.


EDUCATION

University of Belgrade, School of Electrical Engineering, Master of Computer Science

2001-2009

Master thesis - custom Rejoice framework for web development based on Java and Spring.