Alejandro Van Houtte

I’m a software engineer with a backend background, but I’ve never liked being boxed into just one part of the stack. Over time, I’ve been expanding into fullstack work, infrastructure, service orchestration, and developer tooling — basically anything that helps build a system that works well, scales cleanly, and doesn’t fall apart six months later.

In my most recent role, I worked across a fairly messy legacy system with fragmented and duplicated data coming from multiple sources. I built a dynamic enrichment layer to centralize logic, reduce duplication, and improve performance — all without breaking the existing flows that relied on it. I also improved several internal APIs by adding proper filtering, pagination, and field-level controls to make them easier to use and extend.

Outside of that, I’ve been building a modern service-based system from scratch. I’m designing and bootstrapping everything — from the UI (React, Next.js, TailwindCSS), to backend services (NestJS, FastAPI, Spring Boot), to infrastructure (Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ), observability (Prometheus, Grafana), and internal tooling to scaffold new services consistently. I’m deliberately keeping things simple and explicit, so the system remains easy to reason about as it grows.

At this point, I’m comfortable working across the stack — backend, frontend, infra, tooling — and I bring a clear, practical mindset to whatever I’m building. I care about clarity, consistency, and reducing the friction for anyone else working in the system. I like good practices, but I’m not a fan of blindly applying patterns that add more complexity than value.

I work best in teams that value ownership, direct feedback, and building things that actually solve problems. I’m independent, proactive, and usually the one spotting broken assumptions or edge cases early — not to nitpick, but to keep things solid and maintainable. I also value clear communication — when everyone makes the effort to explain things simply and directly, everything moves faster and with less friction.