Auke Bakker

Auke Bakker

Senior Software Engineer

hello@auke.io · linkedin.com/in/aacoba

Auke Bakker

Backend-focused software engineer with 8+ years of experience building reliable systems, APIs, and infrastructure tooling at bol, the largest e-commerce platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. Go expert and advocate, comfortable across the stack. Thrives in small teams with high autonomy and end-to-end ownership.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Shop Core

2023 – present

bol, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Designed and built the shop-router in Go, introducing the language to the Simple Shop architecture. The router is the single entry point for all web traffic, architected so teams can safely own their own routing config, rollout, and infrastructure. Now a core piece of the shop platform with daily contributions from across the org
  • Designed the user identity token system: the shop-router turns session cookies into signed JWTs that travel to every downstream service, replacing scattered auth logic with one source of truth
  • Built bol's anti-bot defense: a layered system where each level in the architecture, from edge to backend, adds information and gets more precise. Tackles everything from DDoS and content scrapers to product scalpers and click fraud
  • Kickstarted distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) at bol, laying the groundwork that the rest of the platform now builds on
  • Got Claude Code into bol by finding a creative GCP workaround to bypass lengthy vendor onboarding. Now rolling out company-wide

Senior Software Engineer, Product Catalog

2021 – 2023

bol, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Tech Lead for Product Step Change initiatives, advising product MT
  • Introduced Go to the team and validated Go + BigTable for cloud-native migration. 140k rps at 10ms p99 baseline, scaling effortlessly for Black Friday peaks
  • Cloud Liaison for a 150-engineer product area, guiding cloud migration architecture

Software Engineer, Product Catalog

2018 – 2021

bol, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Joined as young professional, progressed to mid-level within a year
  • Core contributor to the Catalonia project: reengineered the product catalog text pipeline, enabling bol's multilingual ambitions

Software Engineer (intern to part-time)

2016 – 2018

ShoppingMinds, Utrecht, Netherlands

  • Built CI/CD and monitoring infrastructure; managed core API load balancers

Education

BSc Software and Information Engineering

2014 – 2018

Utrecht University of Applied Sciences

Personal Influence Programme

2020

Bureau Zuidema

Skills & Tools

Languages

Go, Kotlin/Java, Python

Infrastructure

Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry

Data

BigQuery, BigTable, Redis, Pub/Sub

Practices

Distributed systems, API design, observability, security architecture, incident command

Want to get in touch? Contact me