A small, scannable index of who I am and what I do.

I'm Anya Reis, a software architect working on distributed systems — payment graphs, eventually-consistent ledgers, multi-region rollouts. Fifteen years in, three companies long enough to ship something real, two short stops that taught me what not to do, and one infra startup that didn't survive the 2023 rate hike.

This page is what's left when you remove the photo, the headline animation, and the stack-of-stickers. Five sections. Read what's relevant.

I take on two engagements at once, three to nine months each. Mostly: scaling payment systems past their first regional split, and extracting an old monolith into a graph of services without losing the consistency guarantees the business is actually relying on (which are usually fewer and stranger than the team thinks).

I take on a third engagement only if it's pro bono — usually a small co-op or worker collective in Portugal that needs a hand with infra. One month a year I write.

• 2025-09
  Idempotency keys are the point. Everything else is a footnote. On building payment systems that survive partial failure.
• 2024-11
  Migrations: the org problem first, the schema problem second. A note from three years of monolith-to-services work.
• 2024-04
  Reconciliation is not a feature. Why every ledger team eventually rebuilds the closing job.
• 2023-08
  The distributed systems book I wish I'd read in 2012. Annotated bibliography, six entries, no Kleppmann jokes.
• 2022-02
  A senior engineer's last six months: what changes. On the shift from writing code to writing decisions.