Senior Backend Engineer → Software Architect · Montevideo, Uruguay 🇺🇾
I build and design backend systems that have to survive real production load. For the last five years I've been working on core banking at IBM Uruguay — a Java/Spring Boot microservice platform on OpenShift that talks to a COBOL/z-OS mainframe over JMS, serving one of the largest home banking systems in the region.
Lately my work has shifted from writing services to deciding how systems fit together: integration patterns, platform design, observability, and lately how to put LLMs into enterprise workflows without turning them into a science project.
- 🏦 Backend & integration design for Santander Home Banking (Java · Spring Boot · OpenShift · JMS · mainframe)
- 🤖 Building a production RAG platform at IBM's AI Innovation Group — Milvus, LangGraph, Granite on watsonx, hybrid BM25 + dense retrieval with RRF and cross-encoder reranking
- 🧭 Working toward TOGAF, on top of IBM's Architectural Thinking certification
- 🛡️ Contributing WAF plugins to the OWASP Core Rule Set (n8n protection + file upload detection)
- 🎓 Finishing my Ingeniería en Informática thesis at UCU — defense December 2026
| Languages |     |
| Backend |     |
| Platform |      |
| Data |      |
| AI |    |
| Frontend |     |
| Ops & Security |     |
Enterprise RAG Platform — Retrieval system for internal documentation. 7-stage ingestion pipeline, hybrid retrieval (BM25 + dense + RRF) with cross-encoder reranking, Milvus as vector store, LangGraph for orchestration, Celery for async workloads. Currently migrating embedding and reranking off self-hosted GPUs to managed inference.
ToolDashboard — Internal developer portal that replaced per-tool logins with a single SSO entry point. Next.js 14 + Keycloak OIDC, OpenResty reverse proxy, YAML-driven tool catalog, deployed on OpenShift Virtualization with Podman + Quadlet and Ansible.
OWASP CRS Plugins — Two WAF plugins for the Core Rule Set: n8n workflow protection and file upload threat detection. Registry IDs 9,529,000–9,530,999.
FAU Personnel Management System — Thesis project: NestJS + Angular + PostgreSQL + MinIO, built for the Uruguayan Air Force.
Most of my day-to-day work lives behind IBM's firewall, so this profile shows a fraction of it. Happy to walk through architecture and trade-offs in a conversation.
IBM Architectural Thinking · IBM Generative & Agentic AI Expert · Datadog SRE · DevSecOps · AWS AI FastTrack 2026
📫 giffunilucas@ on LinkedIn — open to conversations about backend architecture, platform engineering and applied AI.