The Mountain
An anxiety journal with CBT thought records, mood check-ins, mindfulness and weekly AI reports that turn entries into concrete next steps. Scala 3, ZIO, React.
mountainjournal.app →Hello, I'm
Karlo Novak
Tech Lead & Software Engineer
I lead teams and design distributed systems that scale, and I still write a lot of the code myself, mostly on the backend, but across the whole stack.
- 📍 Zagreb, Croatia
- 💼 13+ years in the industry
About me
I'm an ambitious, experienced software engineer based in Zagreb, Croatia. I currently work as a tech lead at the cybersecurity company Intel 471, leading the team and architecting backend services for a security intelligence system that operates on huge datasets, while still writing code every day.
My core is system design and distributed systems, end to end on the backend: APIs, data pipelines over huge datasets, Postgres and Elasticsearch under load, and the AWS infrastructure underneath, designed to be testable, observable and cheap to run.
Lately a lot of my work is about AI. At Intel 471 I build services that integrate with OpenAI and work on our own MCP server, which exposes our APIs in an AI-native way so assistants and agents can use them directly. The AI reports in The Mountain use the same kind of OpenAI integration. I use Claude Code every day and know well how it works.
Tech I use
- Scala / ZIO
- Java / Spring
- PostgreSQL
- Elasticsearch, OpenSearch
- Redis, MongoDB
- Apache Kafka
- AWS (EC2, Lambda, ECS, S3, RDS, Redshift…)
- Docker, Kubernetes, Linux
- Grafana, Prometheus, Loki
- LLM integrations (OpenAI, structured outputs)
- MCP servers
- Claude Code, AI-assisted development
Also familiar with TypeScript, React, Firebase, Apache Cassandra…
Side projects
Pokédon
A browser-based co-op monster-catching RPG for up to four friends who share a world in real time, chat and beat milestones together. Java 21, Spring Boot, Phaser 3.
pokedon.karlo.dev →
whosthat
Watches home CCTV cameras, spots people with YOLO object detection (even in night-time infrared) and sends a Telegram message with a snapshot. Java, Spring Boot, OpenCV.
GitHub →Experience
- 10/2022 – now
Intel 471Senior Backend Engineer → Tech Lead
Remote, USA - 10/2021 – 10/2022
MELDSenior Backend Engineer
Remote, Singapore - 04/2018 – 10/2021
Greyp Bikes / Rimac AutomobiliLead Backend Engineer
Sveta Nedelja, Croatia - 02/2013 – 04/2018
SV GroupSenior Full-stack Engineer
Zagreb, Croatia
Education
- 2009 – 2012
Polytechnic of ZagrebBSc, Computer Science, Software Engineering
Zagreb, Croatia - 2005 – 2009
XV GymnasiumComputer Science, Mathematics
Zagreb, Croatia
Working together
I can help with:
- System design & architecture
- Backend & distributed systems
- AI integrations (LLMs, MCP)
- DevOps, CI/CD, automation
Want to work together or just ask a question? Reach out on LinkedIn or find my work on GitHub. It would be a pleasure.