Laura Mihai
Manchester
Summary
Software Engineer with 5 years of experience building distributed backend systems, search infrastructure, and cloud-native data platforms. Strong experience across ingestion, indexing, search catalogue systems, Solr, OpenSearch, AWS, and event-driven architectures. Particularly interested in senior backend and search infrastructure roles.
Overview
5
5
years of professional experience
5
5
years of post-secondary education
Work history
Software Engineer
BBC
Salford, England
2024.09 - Current
- Develop and operate backend services and infrastructure for BBC search catalogue systems, supporting large-scale content ingestion, across Solr, OpenSearch, PostgreSQL, and AWS
- Build and maintain event-driven ingestion and indexing workflows using CloudFormation, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, EventBridge, SQS, SNS, and OpenSearch
- Helped design and implement hybrid lexical-semantic search architecture, combining Solr retrieval with OpenSearch vector search and SageMaker-generated embeddings
- Led a large-scale search infrastructure migration triggered by external API deprecation, coordinating ingestion pipeline updates, S3 restructuring, Solr collection migration, validation, and production rollout
- Reorganised shared S3 storage containing millions of provider documents and coordinated reingestion of approximately 2 million news documents into production search infrastructure
- Planned and executed Solr migration activities across multiple clusters, including rollout coordination, validation, and production data comparison
- Participate in on-call rotation and weekly incident fire drills, improving operational readiness and reliability of production search systems
- Conduct technical interviews for senior software engineering candidates
Software Developer
Bet365
Manchester, England
2023.09 - 2024.08
- Worked on the Cashout platform, supporting low-latency transactional systems processing live betting and stream-processing workloads
- Designed and implemented an Erlang OTP-based distributed key-value store with replicated storage and retrieval over TCP and HTTP
- Applied Erlang/OTP supervision, message passing, process isolation, and failure recovery patterns to improve system resilience
Full Stack Software Engineer
AppFox
Reading, England
2022.06 - 2023.05
- Led redevelopment of the company's flagship application within a two-engineer team, modernising the stack and improving product maintainability
- Introduced GraphQL APIs alongside existing REST services to improve data access patterns and application flexibility
- Improved frontend and development workflows through Prisma, component-based styling, testing, and GitHub Actions CI/CD
- Improved application reliability through unit, snapshot, and GraphQL integration testing using Jest
- Acted as Product Owner, managing roadmap planning, stakeholder communication, prioritisation, and Scrum ceremonies
Graduate Full Stack Software Engineer
AppFox
Reading, England
2021.06 - 2022.05
- Delivered frontend and backend features across multiple applications in a small engineering team
- Supported migration of Confluence-based data into proprietary systems while maintaining data accuracy and integrity
- Worked closely with senior engineers on architecture, delivery planning, and technical decision-making
Education
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
The University of Manchester
Manchester, England 2017.09 - 2020.06
Bachelor of Arts - Film Studies
The University of Warwick
Coventry, England 2015.09 - 2017.06
Skills
- Search & Data Platforms: Solr, OpenSearch, semantic search, indexing pipelines, ingestion workflows, PostgreSQL
- Cloud & Infrastructure : AWS, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, EC2, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, CloudFormation
- Backend: TypeScript, Nodejs, Erlang/OTP, event-driven architecture
- Frontend & APIs: React, GraphQL, REST
- CI/CD & Testing : GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Jest
Timeline
Software Engineer
BBC
2024.09 - Current
Software Developer
Bet365
2023.09 - 2024.08
Full Stack Software Engineer
AppFox
2022.06 - 2023.05
Graduate Full Stack Software Engineer
AppFox
2021.06 - 2022.05
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
The University of Manchester
2017.09 - 2020.06
Bachelor of Arts - Film Studies
The University of Warwick
2015.09 - 2017.06