Profile⌗

Senior backend engineer specializing in Go-based distributed systems and payments infrastructure. I have led design and delivery of high-throughput platforms across multiple teams, with a focus on event-driven architecture and correctness under failure.

Recent roles⌗

Betika (Contract) - Senior Software Engineer⌗

Remote | March 2026 to Present

  • Contract engagement focused on backend delivery and platform development.

Banked - Senior Backend Engineer, Payments⌗

Remote | November 2021 to February 2026

  • Led redesign of the core payments platform, decomposing a legacy monolith into event-driven Go microservices with clear ownership.
  • Owned end-to-end rebuild of UK Open Banking payments, including architecture, migration strategy, and production rollout.
  • Led a zero-impact production database migration for core payments data with validation, backfills, and rollback controls.
  • Drove messaging queue migration for payments workflows using dual writes, consumer cutover, and replay while preserving correctness and ordering.
  • Designed reusable NATS service tooling and Helm abstractions that improved consistency and reduced operational overhead.
  • Acted as technical lead for payments infrastructure standards across Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, and observability.
  • Drove production integrations with Visa to deliver a UK VRP solution across internal and external teams.
  • Enabled connectivity to 300+ European banks via multiple aggregators.

American Express - Go Engineer, Loyalty Platform⌗

Remote | July 2021 to November 2021

  • Delivered migration of millions of customer records using event-driven microservices with strong replayability and correctness.
  • Designed and implemented multi-zone Kafka deployments to improve availability and reduce blast radius during failures.
  • Mentored and onboarded junior engineers, establishing Go best practices.

American Express - Java Engineer, Business Travel Accounts⌗

Burgess Hill | June 2019 to July 2021

  • Modernized legacy COBOL batch processing by designing event-driven Java microservices.
  • Engineered a scalable SFTP ingestion gateway using S3 and Kafka for high-volume enterprise data flows.
  • Led rollout of Kafka dead-letter queue and replay tooling to improve incident recovery and debugging.

Skills⌗

  • Languages: Go, Java, Kotlin, Rust
  • Distributed systems: event-driven architecture, idempotency, replay, consistency
  • Messaging: Kafka, NATS, Google Pub/Sub
  • Cloud and platform: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, GKE
  • Delivery: GitHub Actions, Helm, ArgoCD

Education⌗

  • University of Brighton - BSc (Hons) Computer Science, 2:1 (2015 to 2019)

Current availability⌗

Open to backend contract opportunities. Short discovery calls are welcome.

Available for contract work: charliehowes97@outlook.com.