Rafael de Souza

Senior Backend/API Engineer with 18+ years building SaaS platforms, financial-services workflows, AWS/serverless APIs and internal automation. Specialized in third-party API integrations, backend modernization, workflow automation and AI-accelerated engineering delivery. Integrated 100+ APIs, improved API response times by up to 40% and reduced infrastructure costs by up to 25%.

Senior API & Full Stack Engineer at Client: Financial Services / Loan Brokerage Platform (2023-12 – 2026-06)

Built and maintained CRM, lender integration, loan-search and workflow automation systems connecting customer data, banking/lender APIs and broker workflows.

• Integrated 100+ third-party APIs across PHP, Symfony and Node.js/serverless services, improving interoperability, reducing API-related errors and supporting brokerage automation at scale.
• Optimized API/backend workflows, improving response times by up to 40% and reducing broker processing time by 15% through loan-search automation.
• Mentored junior developers on API practices, integration design and maintainable backend delivery.

Senior Full Stack Engineer at Client: Media Data Automation Platform (2023-01 – 2023-12)

Built, automated and tested data-transfer workflows synchronizing a master dataset with downstream systems for a major media company.

• Delivered fully tested functional code, improved team visibility through clear communication and earned two contract extensions for follow-on work.

Senior API Developer at Client: Healthcare Payments Platform (2021-07 – 2022-12)

Expanded AWS Lambda API services and supported mobile API architecture redesign for healthcare payments workflows.

• Improved API response time by 35% and delivered security improvements that reduced vulnerabilities by 40%.

Full Stack Developer at Digital Asset Management & Fleet SaaS Platforms (2013-10 – 2021-05)

Built data-heavy CMS and asset-processing systems handling millions of records, including image classification and duplicate-image detection with Node.js, AWS API Gateway and Serverless Framework.

• Developed AWS/serverless APIs and platform improvements that reduced infrastructure costs by 25%, improved API response times by 40% and cut QA time by 50% through automation.

Backend / PHP Developer at High-Traffic Web Applications (2008-02 – 2013-09)

Delivered PHP/MySQL backend development, database optimization and web application maintenance across agency, product and high-traffic web environments.

Computer & Information Security – TU Dublin