Milan Aleksić

Last updated: 23/01/2026

Personal

Born on 21/12/1983, Smederevo (Serbia), living in Koekelberg (Belgium) with my wife and children since 2011. I hold dual citizenship of Belgium and Serbia.

My website is aleksic.dev, email is [email protected] and Twitter account is: milanaleksic. I am fairly active on github.com/milanaleksic. My LinkedIn account is @milanaleksic if you’d like to connect with me.

Education & spoken languages

Dipl. Ing. Computer Science & Engineering (2008) from the University of Belgrade (Serbia), Faculty of Electrical Engineering (ETF). “NARIC – Vlaanderen” recognized my diploma as M.Sc..

I speak the following languages: Serbian (mother tongue), English (fluent), Dutch (C1 Effectiveness 1), French (A2, basic level)

Keywords

Java, Go, AWS, Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse

Work experience

[2020-…] Senior Software Engineer @ Soda (remote; HQ in Brussels, Belgium)

Backend founding engineer of Soda, working on Soda Cloud SaaS. Programming languages I used were Java, Python and Go.

I became the company’s go-to backend engineer and MySQL performance guy. Helped scale the company 100x in both customers and revenue during my tenure in Soda.

I had a multi-hat impact on the organization through domain, infrastructure, and system design as well as providing engineering support and coaching. Some of the most prominent backend features I worked on were internal frameworks for authorization, feature gates, notification rules, database and search query framework, dependency injection, configuration management, OpenAPI code generator, etc. I also participated in the development of many of Soda critical architecture components beside backend: Decrypter, Guardian, Soda Kubernetes Agent, introduction of ClickHouse etc.

I also envisioned and developed an internal devops CLI tool (dopy / dogo) for automating many painful DevOps tasks. v1 was in Python, v2 in Go (integrating APIs from AWS, Okta, Datadog, Kubernetes, Soda Cloud Admin API, Github).

After Claude Code had been introduced, I worked on AI-driven tooling and agent-friendliness of backend.

[2017-2020] Expert Software Engineer @ TomTom (Ghent, Belgium)

MPU Core Coverage Creation & Extension Team

MLF library: authored code-generated Java wrapper around GDAL OpenFileGDB (later extended to PostGIS and GeoPackage).
- Custom ANTLR grammar for extended validation and Python/Markdown doc generator
Sinatra: Led migration of a complex process into AWS for GIS source data digestion
- PostgreSQL RDS, Spring Boot 2, SQS, ECS, Terraform, Vue.js
Pupin: created machine learning cloud service for data classification (plural junctions problem)
- Training: PostGIS, Python, Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, (Geo)Pandas, Jupyter
- Online+Batch prediction: Terraform / AWS ECS, Spring Boot 2, XGBoost
Dumbo: migration of internal heavily used batch processing tool into the cloud
- AWS Batch, ECS, PostgreSQL, S3, X-Ray; Spring Boot 2, Terraform, Python, Jenkins

Hermes team

Nozem: always-up-to-date OpenStreetMap ingestion service into core TomTom data layer: Kafka, PostgreSQL, Python, Spring Boot, Jenkins
Lego: automated OpenStreetMap features ingestion: k8s, Python, Java, QGIS plugins

[2013-2017] {Senior, Lead} Software Engineer @ Basware (Aalst, Belgium)

Projects:

Basware Network Portal: Full-stack development role on online and internal services
- Tech stack: Play2, Scala, Java8, MongoDB, Spring, Chef, Go
- Rewritten core validation business rules implementation (Java)
Basware e-Archiving: DevOps lead-in-charge and one of lead developers
- Tech stack: CloudFormation, Jenkins, Bash, AWS CLI
- Cloud stack: Java Lambda functions, API GW, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Splunk
Norsu (Groovy, Cucumber, Gradle): Cross-systems end-to-end testing
Business Metrics dashboards (Akka and Dashing.io)
Migration of legacy Resin applications to Tomcat cluster
- Oracle, JSP, RMI, Ant, Tomcat, Apache2
HAL9000 (Go): Flowdock bot (CI/CD automation helper for 100+ developers)

[2006-2013] Previous work experience

2014: Freelance Consultant (remote) @ Gtech UK (Brussels, Belgium)

2011-2013: Software consultant @ Cronos (Belgium) (Brussels, Belgium)

2009-2011: Software Engineer II @ Gtech G2 Sports Betting (Belgrade, Serbia)

2007-2009: Java Developer @ Arius (Belgrade, Serbia)

2006: Intern software developer @ ESAProjekt (Katowice, Poland)

Selected open source projects

Advent of Code 2023 (Zig): github.com/milanaleksic/adventofcode2023
Advent of Code 2018 (Go): github.com/milanaleksic/adventofcode2018
Personal Web site (Hugo, Cloudflare Pages): github.com/milanaleksic/aleksic.dev

Selected closed source personal projects

Home Laboratory: Hybrid cluster: ARM/AMD, Proxmox LXCs/metal, home/Oracle Cloud. Uses Ansible for setup and Kubernetes (k3s) for container scheduling of 40+ services. Deep monitoring via Grafana Stack and Prometheus. Migrated away from Nomad in 2025.
Thought Train (Go, PostgreSQL, NATS, htmx) My main side project – a distributed service for feature-rich web page content extraction, note-taking, and book annotation. Uses an ANTLR search query grammar, R2 as object storage, with mobile apps (Flutter for Android/iOS), and a Chrome Extension (Svelte).
Novinarnica (Go): Content crawler and CBR packager for magazines.
kube-home-dns (Go): k8s controller that is at the same time a home DNS server, a NextDNS forwarder, a Cloudflare DNS record syncer and a Caddy config provider for my k8s-free DMZ ingress