About
Caroline Marques
Hi, I'm Caroline. I'm a software engineer in Munich, Germany, usually working somewhere between backend systems, product development, and the infrastructure that keeps both running.
I like software that still makes sense when someone opens the code six months later.
The short version
How I ended up here
I am a full-stack engineer with a backend bias. Most of the problems I enjoy live around APIs, services, cloud infrastructure, authentication, and product features that have to survive real production use.
I am particularly interested in the points where those things meet. A feature is not really finished if deploying it is fragile, debugging it is miserable, or the next engineer has to reverse-engineer why it works.
Things I care about when building software
Make complexity earn its place
Architecture should solve a problem that actually exists. I like clear boundaries and boring solutions when boring solutions are enough.
Production counts
A feature is more than the happy path. Deployment, observability, authentication, migrations, and failure modes are part of the product too.
Leave the code better for the next person
Readable systems scale better than clever ones. Developer experience matters when it removes friction without hiding important trade-offs.
Product details become architecture
Internationalization, locale, authentication, and permissions eventually shape the system. Treating them as afterthoughts usually gets expensive.
In practice
A few places this has taken me
- Internationalization
Led the rollout of Japanese for an international software product, from the first idea through implementation and delivery.
- Infrastructure
Moved deployment authentication from long-lived AWS credentials to short-lived GitLab OIDC credentials.
- Security
Worked directly with security and pentesting efforts connected to successful product certification.
- Product engineering
Built features across backend, frontend, cloud, and mobile boundaries, close enough to see where the real product edges were.
Currently
Occupying my brain
Building
Local AI as personal infrastructure
I am building a shared local inference setup for personal applications and assistants.
Experimenting with
Useful local models
I am comparing local models and coding tools to learn where privacy, latency, and model size change the experience.
When I'm not at a keyboard
Bouldering / climbing
Bouldering and climbing
Most weeks, I am working on V5s and V6s.
Board games
Board games
Usually something with an interesting system to untangle.
See what I've been playing ->Quarto de Despejo
Quarto de Despejo
Quarto de Despejo
By Carolina Maria de Jesus.
I also have a tendency to turn small annoyances into side projects, which is how the local LLM setup and grammar assistant happened.
Elsewhere