Gosia Politowska
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Kaga, Ishikawa, Japan
Toptal member since June 14, 2016
Gosia is a passionate software engineer with 13 years of experience in developing scalable web applications and microservices that run on JVM. She specializes in back-end development and she's up to date with the latest technologies, frameworks, and coding conventions. She pays a lot of attention to code quality and testability.
Portfolio
Experience
- Java - 13 years
- JUnit 5 - 13 years
- REST APIs - 10 years
- Spring Boot - 10 years
- Microservices - 8 years
- Apache Kafka - 5 years
- Kafka Streams - 4 years
- Kotlin - 2 years
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Java, Kotlin, Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams, Gradle, JUnit 5, Spring Boot, REST APIs, Microservices
The most amazing...
...team leader I've worked with taught me everything about writing good tests and writing clean and easily testable code - aspects I always pay great attention to.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
PayPay
- Developed microservices using Spring Boot, Kafka, Elasticsearch, MySQL, and Redis, ensuring compliance with company standards for monitoring and alerting. Deployed services on AWS and Kubernetes.
- Conducted system design interviews for mid-level and senior candidates, ensuring their skills met company expectations.
- Introduced Kafka Streams technology when re-writing one of the services. I created a working POC and ran multiple knowledge-sharing sessions for my teammates about Kafka and Kafka Streams.
- Contributed to test standards and significantly increased test coverage by creating unit and integration tests. I refactored existing tests, extracting common tools. I created testing guidelines and ran knowledge-sharing sessions for my teammates.
- Reviewed code actively, ensuring its high quality.
Senior Java Developer
Air New Zealand
- Built multiple microservices based on the Dropwizard framework and used various technologies such as Kafka, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and Redis. I ensured all services followed company standards, including proper monitoring and alerting.
- Designed and documented a solution allowing services to call downstream APIs in parallel and chaining invocations based on RxJava and Resilience4j. This solution is now widely used in other products within the company.
- Pioneered Kafka usage, developing an internal testing library, Dropwizard Kafka bundle, and tutorials on Avro data format and Schema Registry.
- Conducted multiple Java sessions for my team's QA, helping them improve their technical skills. I guided and helped them create a test automation solution based on Appium.
- Led and co-hosted other knowledge-sharing sessions for developers and QA about Kafka, RxJava, and Git.
- Volunteered to be a tech leader for an app for cabin crew. I picked it up in an early MVP stage, designed integrations with other systems, and created solutions based on Kafka and Elasticsearch. The app is now used by all cabin crew and pilots.
Senior Java Developer
Citi
- Reimplemented a monolithic system into modular microservices using Spring Boot.
- Developed functional tests leveraging the Cucumber framework for improved reliability.
- Created performance tests using the Cucumber and Gatling framework.
- Maintained and resolved issues in the legacy system to ensure stability and continuity.
Senior Java Developer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Refactored and enhanced the security model so that it follows security best practices.
- Improved code quality by refactoring numerous parts of the existing code.
- Created a performance-testing POC using the Gatling framework (Scala).
- Implemented and tested modules leveraging AWS Lambda for scalability.
- Integrated modules using Amazon SQS and SNS for seamless communication.
- Built asynchronous integrations with third-party software using Apache Camel and Hystrix.
- Designed, documented, and implemented REST API endpoints with Spring MVC.
Senior Java Developer
Minds + Machines
- Introduced Docker to the team and adjusted the integration testing environment using the Docker instance with PostgreSQL database, which can be easily reset before running a test suite.
- Designed and implemented security model and OAuth2 authorization mechanism using Spring Security.
- Worked on designing, documenting, and implementing API endpoints using Spring MVC.
- Introduced the Spock framework and adjusted tests.
- Worked on implementing asynchronous communication between modules using RabbitMQ.
Software Engineer
Innovative Interfaces
- Designed and implemented public RESTful APIs in Scala using a Scalatra framework.
- Created an extensive API documentation using Swagger.
- Implemented and tested the service layer, using both unit and integration tests.
Java Developer
7bulls.com
- Built user interfaces and front-end layers using JavaScript, GWT, FreeMarker, and Spring MVC.
- Designed and tested business logic with unit and integration tests.
- Strengthened application security with Spring Security.
- Enabled asynchronous module communication through Spring Integration and ActiveMQ.
- Integrated external information sources using Spring Integration and XSLT.
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, AssertJ, Hystrix, Slick
Tools
Git, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Gradle, Apache Maven, Bitbucket, Jira, GitHub, Eclipse IDE, REST Assured, Kafka Streams, Atlassian, Slack, Cucumber, Subversion (SVN), Stash, FreeMarker, AWS SDK, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Jenkins, Bamboo, Gatling, Grafana, Kibana
Languages
Java, Java 8, SQL, Kotlin, Java 6, Python, JavaScript, HTML, XML, Scala, Java 11
Frameworks
Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring MVC, Spring, JPA, Apache Camel, Spring Integration, Hibernate, Swagger, Mockito, JUnit, Spock, Spring Core, Scalatra, GWT, OAuth 2, JUnit 5, Dropwizard, Micronaut
Paradigms
Unit Testing, Microservices, REST, Scrum, Agile Software Development, Model View Controller (MVC)
Platforms
JSE, AWS Lambda, Java EE (Jakarta EE), Linux, Apache Kafka, Eclipse, JBoss, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Spring Data, Spring Data JPA, IBM Db2, Elasticsearch, Redis
Other
Integration Testing, API Testing, Core, Boot, Security, Testcontainers, Prometheus, Java 17
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