IT Analyst & Java Developer

My first years of experience

I joined AXA in 2017 as an IT Analyst.

For the first three years of my career, I was tasked to maintain and evolve AXA’s core insurance management platform—a massive, 15+ year-old monolithic system running on legacy technology (Java 5 & Struts).

This project managed the life-cycle of insurance policies and served as the backoffice that every AXA insurance broker used in Spain. It was a complicated platform at the business level, and from a technical perspective, it reflected years of incremental evolution with no technical upgrades.

I made the most of my time here by working closely with the business, learning their language, understanding their expectations, and pain points.

Moving to new grounds

At the end of 2019, I joined a new team within the IT architecture department.

This was a dream position for any junior dev: a small, cohesive team with teammates highly specialized on the tasks we took upon. Together, we worked on generating libraries and microservices that were used by the rest of the IT teams. I got to implement solutions using Java 8, Spring Boot, and modern cloud infrastructures.

What I learned

The first part of my time at AXA, working on the old platform, made me realize how important domain knowledge is. When documentation is lacking, gaining expertise in a platform usually means expanding your contacts, learning how to interact with stakeholders, and accumulating as much knowledge as possible.

On the technical side, my time on the architecture team was incredibly enriching; I got to learn technologies and workflows that shaped me as a professional.