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About

From pixels to infrastructure.

Full-Stack Engineer designing and delivering cloud-native products with Go, Vue, and AWS.

50,000+learners on the platform
99.9%uptime, held with Prometheus and Grafana
5m→30sp95 on the rescued dashboard

I'm Akash Aloysius James, a Full-Stack Engineer based in Milan. For the past several years I've built cloud-native products end-to-end — from the Vue.js and TypeScript interfaces people actually touch, to the Go services and AWS infrastructure that keep everything running underneath. At Lifeed, I work on an eLearning platform used by more than 50,000 people: I own the learner PWA's frontend, built the internal admin platform on my own from domain model through to interface, and rescued a client-facing analytics dashboard that had degraded to the point of timing out.

What I care about most are the parts of software users never notice: reliable systems, fast response times, and clean architecture that lets a team ship confidently without breaking things. My path here started with a Computer Science degree in Chennai and led to a Master's at Politecnico di Milano, which I worked through — building document-management and approval-workflow applications at MHS Global Impact alongside the degree. Whether I'm shaping API design in a planning session, tuning a frontend for accessibility and performance, or provisioning infrastructure as code with Terraform, I like owning problems from first idea to production. Always happy to connect with people who care about building thoughtful, well-crafted software.

Download résuméLong-term work permit in Italy — authorized to work without visa sponsorship.

Experience

October 2023
— Present
· Milan, Italy

Full-Stack Engineer · Lifeed

Full-Stack Engineer on a Go + Vue/TypeScript eLearning platform serving 50,000+ learners — responsible for the learner PWA's frontend, and for the internal admin platform end-to-end, from domain model and interface design through to implementation.

Responsibilities

  • Own the learner PWA (Vue, Quasar, GraphQL, Strapi) and the Go BFF in front of it, which aggregates about eight internal services, checks auth on every request and keeps every credential out of the browser.
  • Built a new internal admin platform to replace the old tool, with more services and new features such as user invitations and registration validation, and run it end to end for Customer Success.
  • Own observability, testing and CI/CD across the stack on AWS (Prometheus, Grafana, Go tests, Vitest, GitLab).
  • Review PRs, set coding standards, and take part in architecture and roadmap planning.

Achievements

  • Rescued a client analytics dashboard that had stopped loading: p95 went from about five minutes to about 30 seconds.
  • Held 99.9% uptime after introducing Prometheus and Grafana.
  • Took engineers off copy changes by moving localized text into Ditto, connected to Figma.
  • Built the learner frontend to WCAG 2.1 AA.

Key decisions

  • Warm the cache on a schedule rather than scale the database, since the cost was a cascading invalidation, not missing hardware.
  • Treat the US→EU hosting migration as an audit of every integration. It turned up event tracking already paid for in the support platform, and rebuilding the Intercom workflow on it was followed by a 12% rise in retention and course completion.
  • Rebuild the admin tool on a new domain model rather than extend the old one.
February 2021
— June 2022

Junior Full-Stack Developer · MHS Global Impact

Early-career full-stack role building document management and approval-workflow applications across web and mobile, using Angular and .NET Core on a MySQL backend.

Responsibilities

  • Built Angular apps and .NET Core REST APIs for document management and approval workflows, on MySQL.
  • Contributed to AWS deployments and Jenkins CI/CD.

Achievements

  • Completed the product's Android support from the existing web codebase with Cordova.
  • Built a shared component library that sped up UI work.

Key decisions

  • Fix MySQL performance at the schema level rather than one query at a time.

Education

2019 — 2023
· Milan, Italy

MSc, Computer Science & Engineering

Politecnico di Milano

2014 — 2018
· Chennai, India

BSc, Computer Science & Technology

SRM University

Skills & Capabilities

Frontend

TypeScriptVueQuasarReactNext.jsTailwind

Accessible product interfaces held to WCAG 2.1 AA — Vue and Quasar on the learning platform, React and RSC on this site.

Backend

GoNode.jsGraphQLSSE.NET Core

Streaming Go services with SSE fan-out to the browser, and GraphQL where content had to decouple from code.

Infra

AWSTerraformDockerCI/CDPrometheusGrafana

Keyless CI/CD to AWS over OIDC, the whole estate in Terraform, one box running Docker Compose and watched by Prometheus.

Data

PostgreSQLTimescaleDBRedisMySQL

Time-series at scale — Timescale hypertables for candles, Redis for caching and leader leases, and relational schemas tuned when queries drifted.