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Staff Software Engineer · Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka · openapi-generator contributor
Open to Staff+ backend roles in Tel Aviv and central Israel, on-site or hybrid.
Discuss Staff+ backend work yonvata@gmail.com
I work where product rules, vendor integrations, event flows, and operational risk meet.
Every floor is a chapter of my CV. ScrollSwipe to go inside, or pick a window.
New post: I Stopped Being My AI Agent's Memory · Podcast: The Reading Club · Garage: projects ↓
The strongest fit is Staff+ backend work where product rules, vendors, event flows, and operational risk need to become one system the team can own.
RoofWriting, podcast, contact
If your backend domain needs an owner, let's talk.
The strongest fit is Staff+ backend work where product rules, vendors, event flows, and operational risk need to become one system the team can own.
Case study · Compliance platform Creating a new service boundary for compliance workflows.
Case study · Engineering leverage Turning repeated operational friction into shared tooling.
Owns payments/compliance platform reliability across service boundaries, vendor integrations, migration work, and operational tooling.
Billie, Berlin, GermanyOct 2025 – Present
Staff Software Engineer, Payments
Owns payments/compliance platform reliability across service boundaries, vendor integrations, migration work, and operational tooling.
Compliance platform
Context
Transaction monitoring, screening, and sanction checks crossed product rules, vendor behavior, alerts, and audit expectations.
Decision
I authored the technical spec and interfaces, led the ComplyAdvantage integration, and covered Kafka DLT alerts, settlement reports, and compliance states in the service design.
Result
Scattered operational knowledge became a service teams can reason about, monitor, and recover.
Engineering leverage
Context
Platform work gets expensive when incidents, cronjobs, migrations, and service setup depend on private memory.
Decision
I build Backstage tools, templates, migration plans, and upstream fixes when the reusable path beats another one-off patch.
Result
Engineers start from a known path and can challenge decisions through specs, dashboards, examples, and code.
Case study · Risk architecture Moving risk work toward explicit orchestration and contracts.
Led Staff-level risk work: moving risk decisions into a Risk-owned orchestrator, the Ravelin fraud integration, and the target architecture for buyer risk.
Billie, Berlin, GermanyApr 2025 – Oct 2025
Staff Software Engineer, Risk
Led Staff-level risk work: moving risk decisions into a Risk-owned orchestrator, the Ravelin fraud integration, and the target architecture for buyer risk.
Risk architecture
Context
Risk decisions depended on multiple services, fraud providers, recurrent identification, tokenization, and direct debit behavior.
Decision
I co-designed the Risk Orchestrator, led the Ravelin integration, and authored the Buyer Risk Assessment target architecture.
Result
Risk changes gained a clearer coordination model across providers, payment behavior, and service boundaries.
Built Risk's credit limit and fraud-labelling services, and moved risk signals to event-driven, engineering-owned pipelines.
Billie, Berlin, GermanyNov 2023 – Apr 2025
Senior Software Engineer, Risk
Built Risk's credit limit and fraud-labelling services, and moved risk signals to event-driven, engineering-owned pipelines.
Built shared backend foundations: a service template, a money library used across backend and Android, and large data migrations.
SumUp, Berlin, GermanyJun 2019 – Nov 2023
Senior Software Engineer
Built shared backend foundations: a service template, a money library used across backend and Android, and large data migrations.
Backend development on a distributed product, focused on cache performance and reliability.
Vision-processing algorithms in C++, and production lines for the chips in South Korea and China.
Courses, degrees, and topics that keep showing up in the work.
Courses and workshops:
Reichman University2012 – 2016
B.Sc. Computer Science
Courses, degrees, and topics that keep showing up in the work.
Down to the garage: projects ↓
Latest writing: I Stopped Being My AI Agent's Memory · All posts
I'd love to work with Yonatan againBlake Irvin, Leading Observability Engineering at SumUp
the go-to person for almost any problemOren Hadry, Former Engineering Manager at Inuitive
a highly talented and disciplined software developerShimon Schocken, Computer Science Professor, Reichman University
LobbyHow I work
The hard part of backend engineering is often not choosing a framework. It is finding the real boundary: which team owns the rule, which event is authoritative, what happens when a vendor disagrees, and how the next engineer will debug the failure at 2 a.m.
That is where I tend to be useful. I ask until the domain is crisp enough to model, then turn it into production code, API contracts, migration plans, dashboards, runbooks, or diagrams that survive the handoff.
I care about strong implementation, but the higher leverage is making the system easier for the whole team to operate, extend, and argue about with evidence.
I’d love to work with Yonatan again. He’s incredibly smart, cares deeply about quality but balances this with delivery speed, and (maybe most importantly) a great human to be teammates with. Blake Irvin, Leading Observability Engineering at SumUp
I was privileged to have Yonatan on my team for almost 3 years. Yonatan is a dedicated, intelligent, and hard-working team player who played a key role in our team and was the go-to person for almost any problem. I have seen few people who could match his skills at solving technical problems, coding and design. Oren Hadry, Former Engineering Manager at Inuitive
Yonatan is a highly talented and disciplined software developer, with an excellent background in both computer science and programming. He is a people-person, with remarkable empathy and ability to recognize when and where students and developers need help and further guidelines. He is also a very pleasant and good-spirited colleague. Shimon Schocken, Computer Science Professor, Reichman University
Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot, OpenAPI, Kafka, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker, PostgreSQL, MySQL
Bottom of the building: scroll either way to ride back up to the lobby, or ride to the roof to get in touch.
ParkingSelected work
What I build on my own time.
