01 / Experience

8 YEARS
IN PRODUCTION

From building my first enterprise PHP application to architecting distributed systems serving millions of users — this is the story of how I got here.

Chiliz

Aug 2022 — Apr 2026

Senior Backend Engineer

// Remote

Chiliz is the blockchain infrastructure behind Socios.com - one of Europe's largest Web3 consumer products, connecting sports fans with their favorite clubs through digital fan tokens. I joined as a senior backend engineer and grew into a lead role across multiple teams.

My work centered on building and owning PHP/Symfony microservices that had to be fast, reliable, and consistent under high concurrency. The biggest technical challenges were around asynchronous blockchain transactions ensuring users always got a consistent experience even when on-chain confirmations were delayed or failed. Event-driven architecture with SQS/SNS was central to how we solved this.

As a lead, I was responsible not just for writing code but for defining service boundaries, reviewing architecture decisions, and making sure the systems we built could be maintained and scaled by the teams that came after us.
  • Architected event-driven data pipelines using AWS SQS/SNS for async blockchain transaction processing
  • Led backend development of a high-scale digital asset purchase feature for thousands of concurrent users, launched without incident after extensive stress testing
  • Built blockchain-integrated backend services for wallet management, NFT minting, and staking via EVM smart contracts
  • Implemented full observability stack: Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, performance tracking, log pipelines
  • Managed Kubernetes deployments using Helm, ArgoCD and GitOps workflows across production environments
  • Mentored junior developers, ran code reviews and drove cross-service architecture alignment
PHP Symfony PostgreSQL Redis PHPUnit Behat Blockchain/EVM AWS Kubernetes Docker ArgoCD CI/CD SQS/SNS Datadog Grafana Sentry

Factory (formerly Plava Tvornica)

May 2018 — Aug 2022

Backend Developer

// Osijek, Croatia (later Remote)

I joined Plava Tvornica straight after graduating it was also where I did my internship, so I already knew the team and the codebase. Over four years I went from junior developer to owning the full lifecycle of complex enterprise projects.

The company specialised in Pimcore-based PIM/MDM solutions for large enterprise clients. I became the go-to person for Pimcore, contributing back to the open-source ecosystem and building custom modules that sat on top of the platform. Alongside Pimcore I worked on Laravel-based APIs, payment integrations, ERP system extensions, and WordPress plugins.

This is where I built my foundation for clean API design, CI/CD discipline, test coverage as a habit, and the ability to own a project end-to-end from requirements through to production.
  • Led full-stack development of multiple enterprise web applications from requirements to production
  • Specialised in Pimcore PIM/MDM systems and built custom solutions and contributed to the open-source project
  • Designed and built RESTful APIs in PHP/Laravel supporting complex business workflows, payment providers and ERP integrations
  • Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines, managed server provisioning and production infrastructure
  • Maintained high test coverage with PHPUnit and Codeception across all projects
PHP Laravel Pimcore REST API MySQL Elasticsearch PHPUnit Codeception Angular JavaScript CI/CD Linux Sentry CodeIgniter WordPress