Hello there, my name is

Alex-Ovidiu Popa.

Senior Software Engineer at Trading 212

Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Problem solver and servant-leader. I build critical, low-latency distributed systems — currently on Equity Trading at Trading 212, previously at Garmin and Goldman Sachs. I care about reliability, observability and clean, well-tested code.

GitHub LinkedIn

Experience

Trading 212

Senior Software Engineer Aug 2026 – Present

Romania

  • Equity Trading.

Garmin

Senior Software Engineer Dec 2024 – Jul 2026

Cluj-Napoca

  • Technical leadership on and delivery of several Garmin Connect features — Auto-Detected Activities, Health Status and Lifestyle Logging.
  • Championed platform improvements: aspect-oriented programming, chaos engineering, event-driven architectures, observability and resilience testing.
  • Founded a department-wide knowledge-sharing forum — 50+ bi-weekly sessions across 20 speakers, focused on pushing junior engineers to grow.
Software Engineer Mar 2024 – Dec 2024

Cluj-Napoca

Goldman Sachs

Associate (Software Engineer) Dec 2023 – Feb 2024

Warsaw

  • Worked on a critical, low-latency distributed system handling 800M+ daily calls.
  • Led a zero-downtime Java 8 → 17 migration and a 10× performance boost through targeted dependency upgrades.
  • Built cross-region service probers on the Prometheus / Grafana / Alertmanager stack to monitor the four Golden Signals.
  • Migrated a monolith to Spring and moved workloads from VMs to Kubernetes for horizontal scaling.
Analyst (Software Engineer) Jul 2021 – Dec 2023

Warsaw

Analyst (Software Engineer), Intern Jul 2020 – Aug 2020

Warsaw

  • Built a Java (Vert.x) REST API over an audit system with Elasticsearch, serving real-time client statistics to stakeholders.

Education

Skills

Cassandra MariaDB Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java Spring Kubernetes Go

Languages

  • RomanianNative / Bilingual
  • EnglishProfessional Working
  • FrenchElementary
  • GermanElementary

Selected projects

yacmo

Go

Yet Another Chaos Monkey — a chaos-engineering tool written in Go.

load-balancer

Go

A load balancer in Go with rate limiting, circuit breaking and Prometheus metrics.

cqrs

Java

A demonstration of the CQRS pattern.

outbox

Java

A Spring Boot implementation of the Transactional Outbox pattern.

utils

Shell

Shell scripts for macOS development and environment configuration.