Senior Backend Engineer · 8 years

Nicolás Cancino

I build cloud-native distributed systems in Go on GCP — microservices, event-driven pipelines, hexagonal architectures, and data platforms at retail scale.

Open to remote employment and select freelance work. Based in Santiago, Chile · working across LATAM and US timezones.

Experience

8 years building backend systems.

Senior Software Engineer · Falabella

Nov 2021 – Apr 2026 · Santiago, Chile

Backend engineering on production systems at large-scale retail. Led the migration of services to Google Cloud (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL). Designed event-driven ingestion via Pub/Sub. Built streaming/batch data pipelines with Apache Beam / Dataflow (Java) on Kubernetes. Worked across Go and Java microservices with a focus on reliability, observability, and clean architecture.

Backend Engineer (Independent Consultant) · Freelance

Led the from-scratch rebuild of a production service using hexagonal architecture in Go, plus a custom migration tool to transform and move records distributed across multiple tenants from Firestore to PostgreSQL — enabling complex filtering not feasible in the previous NoSQL design. Drove adoption of code-first API documentation by introducing OpenAPI/Swagger generation directly from Go code via swaggo. Refactored multiple Go microservices to hexagonal architecture, decoupling domain logic from infrastructure. Implemented end-to-end request tracing via context.Context propagation and structured logging with zerolog.

Semi-Senior Software Engineer · BC Tecnología

Jul 2019 – Oct 2021 · Santiago, Chile

Designed and built backend microservices and REST APIs in Node.js for a large-scale e-commerce platform, supporting production retail traffic. Owned the full microservice lifecycle: API design, implementation, deployment, and observability.

Software Engineer · Zenta

Mar 2019 – Jul 2019 · Santiago, Chile

Built proof-of-concept solutions for LATAM corporate clients, including a 'Things to do' recommendation chatbot integrating Google Maps and DialogFlow.

Software Engineer · 23People SPA

Jan 2018 – Mar 2019 · Santiago, Chile

Developed Java/Spring microservices for a corporate internal application along with the corresponding Angular frontends consuming those services.

Side projects

What I'm building on the side.

Ambrocito Training

Online platform for selling and streaming calisthenics video courses. Course catalog, lesson player with HMAC-protected HLS streaming, MercadoPago checkout, JWT auth with Google sign-in linking, transactional email.

Go 1.25 Astro 6 Tailwind v4 PostgreSQL GORM Cloud Run Cloudflare Workers Cloudflare R2 Supabase Resend

DaniG Yoga

Online platform for selling and streaming yoga video courses. Hexagonal Go backend, Astro PWA frontend with hls.js video player, full deploy stack on Cloud Run + Cloudflare Pages + Supabase.

Go 1.25 Astro 6 Tailwind v4 PostgreSQL GORM Cloud Run Cloudflare Pages Cloudflare R2 Supabase

Now

What I'm exploring.

Currently practicing AI-augmented development with Claude Code and Open Code, using Spec-Driven Development (SDD) workflows to keep architecture decisions, specs, and implementation in lockstep instead of drifting apart.

Using gentle-ai (by Gentleman Programming) as part of my AI toolkit, contributing back where I find rough edges.

Applying these tools to ship side projects fast and to contribute to open-source codebases without compromising architectural discipline. The two side projects above were both built in this mode.

Stack

Tools I reach for.

Languages
Go Java JavaScript / Node.js SQL TypeScript
Cloud / Infra
GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Endpoints) Docker Kubernetes Terraform
Databases
PostgreSQL BigQuery Firestore
Architecture
Microservices Event-driven systems Hexagonal architecture Clean architecture Domain-Driven Design (DDD) CQRS REST APIs
Observability
Structured logging (zerolog) Distributed tracing via context propagation Datadog
DevOps & Tooling
GitLab CI/CD GitHub Actions Git Conventional Commits Spec-Driven Development (SDD) Claude Code Open Code MCP servers

Get in touch

Let's build something.

Best reached over email. I read everything but reply faster to messages with context — what you're building, what stack, what you'd want from me.

ncancino7@gmail.com