Iago Souto

I am a Software Engineer with over 6 years of experience, specializing in building scalable and maintainable software solutions. My work focuses on aligning technology with business needs while ensuring reliability, efficiency, and measurable impact. I hold a professional technical degree in Information Technology from the Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG) and a Bachelor's degree in Information Systems from the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA).

I apply best practices such as SOLID principles, Clean Code, and Test-Driven Development to deliver clean and robust systems. My core skills include developing Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, Serverless Applications, API Security, and FinTech API Integrations. Currently at Bluelight, I serve as the primary engineer for Bizhaven, a multi-tenant SaaS platform, where I own the fullstack architecture with focus on backend and feature delivery using Laravel, Filament, Livewire and ReactJS, building systems such as a Document Management Module, an admin backoffice panel, and critical platform integrations including SSO with Keycloak, Email integration with Resend API and e-signature workflows with DocuSeal.

At Winx, I designed and optimized a file-to-database import system in Laravel that reduced processing time by 95%. This solution leveraged AWS Lambda with Laravel Vapor to ensure fully asynchronous processing, robust error handling, and automated notifications, applying advanced Laravel concepts throughout. The platform ran on PostgreSQL, with Elasticsearch indexing the results of every campaign we dispatched and feeding the engagement and culture score calculations the product reported.

In addition, while working at Objective on projects for their client, EBANX, I contributed to payment solutions adopted by major global players such as Netflix, Meta, and Amazon, ensuring reliability and scalability in high-demand environments. Proficient in PHP, Laravel, unit testing, MySQL and PostgreSQL, AWS (Lambda, SQS, S3), Docker, Git and CI/CD pipelines, with hands-on experience integrating international payment gateway APIs and AI-powered features. I have collaborated with distributed teams across Africa and Latin America, delivering cross-border fintech integrations and solutions for international markets, and today I work with a team in the United States.

My current objective is to expand my career internationally, contributing to innovative projects that impact users worldwide, while driven by a deep passion for software architecture. My goal is to continually deepen my knowledge, both academically and professionally, starting with a postgraduate specialization in software architecture, with the aim of becoming a world-class software architect.

Senior Software Engineer - Bluelight

(2026-01)

Principal engineer on Bizhaven, a multi-tenant SaaS platform, working with a US-based team. Full ownership of the backend architecture (Laravel, Filament, Livewire, ReactJS).

• Designed and built a Document Management Module from scratch on Laravel: new data model, migration strategy, and a DDD-based modular architecture over a clean MVC structure.
• Built a data migration pipeline with transactional safety, validation, dry-run mode and rollback, covered by ~96 PHPUnit tests that guarantee data integrity and idempotency on re-runs.
• Integrated DocuSeal for e-signatures: ordered signing flows, reusable templates, real-time webhook handling and a document lifecycle state machine.
• Led two platform integrations end to end, Resend for transactional email and SSO with Keycloak, as the only engineer on both the backend and the frontend work.
• Wrote the technical documentation for every module I delivered, including data models, migration runbooks and integration contracts, so other engineers can maintain it without me.
• Use Claude Code as a pair-programming assistant to speed up delivery and improve code quality, applying Spec-Driven Development, Harness Engineering and MCP tool integration.

Software Engineer IV - Objective

(2025-06 - 2026-01)

Cross-border payments platform processing transactions for global merchants including Netflix, Meta and Amazon.

• Integrated Nigerian and Egyptian payment gateways into EBANX's systems through their APIs, enabling bank transfer and mobile money for global merchants. All of it in PHP 8, with DDD, SOLID and broad PHPUnit coverage.
• Owned payment authentication and security, the part of the flow that has to resist fraud: card verification, 3D Secure (3DS), OTP, simple and network-based card tokenization, expirable keys and layered security checks.
• Shipped the Mobile Wallet payment method on EBANX's checkout for Egypt. Its PHP server-side logic processes and validates every input arriving from the ReactJS frontend, and the method now handles thousands of payments per day.
• Diagnosed and fixed production defects by reading integration logs in OpenSearch to reconcile both sides of each transaction, and by stepping through flows locally with XDebug.
• Worked in English with product and engineering teams across Latin America and Africa (Colombia, Egypt and Nigeria) to align API contracts and release plans.

Software Engineer - Winx

(2022-08 - 2025-01)

• Built a complete survey management system in PHP/Laravel from the ground up: MVC application, REST APIs, form builder and result processing, applying SOLID, Clean Code and TDD, on PostgreSQL.
• Handled large-scale data: massive employee imports, chunked and queued processing, and PostgreSQL query and index tuning.
• Worked extensively with asynchronous Laravel (jobs, queues, events and observers) and contributed to the architecture of new services.
• Delivered AI-powered HR recommendation features by integrating Generative AI APIs and training custom models through OpenAI fine-tuning.

Software Engineer - Bernoulli Educação

(2022-01 - 2022-08)

• Refactored a legacy PHP system onto Laravel, untangling procedural code into an MVC structure with proper models, controllers and service classes.
• Contributed to architecture decisions for the target system and built frontend features in Vue.js.

Software Engineer - Codificar Sistemas Tecnológicos

(2021-03 - 2021-10)

• Maintained and extended web systems and mobile apps in Laravel, VueJS, jQuery and React Native, shipping bi-weekly Android and iOS releases.
• Triaged and fixed client-reported bugs through Redmine, and owned weekly homologation and Git versioning.

Bachelor's Degree - Information Systems - Federal University of Lavras (UFLA) (2025-12)

Professional Technical Degree - Information Technology - Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG) (2019-01)