GoTalks at Fonoa: Engineering for Scale in the World of Tax

What does it take to scale a tax platform across 100+ countries? Last week, we hosted the GoTalks meetup at our Zagreb office—the official community event for Google’s Golang programming language.

The GoTalks community has been running strong for over five years, and this was the first time Fonoa came on board as a sponsor. With around 40 engineers in the room, the conversation was lively, focused, and grounded in the real-world challenges of building and maintaining complex distributed systems.

At Fonoa, we’re building a platform to automate tax compliance in real time across 100+ countries—a space that demands reliability, scale, and clarity in every decision.

Go represents forward-thinking engineering work, and supporting events like this is part of how we give back to the engineering community—and connect with others solving equally hard problems in tax and fintech.

Lessons from the Fonoa Engineering Team

Drazen Mrvos, Senior Software Engineer at Fonoa, opened with a talk on his shift from .NET to Go. His comparison was grounded in real production experience—not just syntax or tooling, but the broader impact on team velocity, code maintainability, and architecture.

His key takeaway: there’s no silver bullet, but Go’s simplicity and predictability make it a strong choice for systems where correctness and scale matter.

Later, Antonio Kristicevic, Engineering Manager at Fonoa, gave a talk on asynchronous service communication at Fonoa—specifically, how we’ve approached messaging between services as our product and team have grown.

Antonio shared some of the trade-offs we made, the patterns we’ve evolved toward, and one idea that resonated: frugality is a feature, not a limitation. When working in a high-stakes space like tax, simple, robust patterns often outperform overly abstract solutions.

4 Key Takeaways for Engineers Solving Tax Problems

• 🛠 Go enables clarity at scale. Especially in a domain like tax, where correctness and traceability are critical, Go’s minimalism helps keep things understandable across teams.
• 🔁 Tax complexity doesn’t require complex systems. You can scale with lean async patterns—our architecture avoids unnecessary queues, orchestration layers, or over-engineered tooling.
• 🧠 The right stack supports the right conversations. Switching from .NET to Go changed how we think about problems—and how we collaborate to solve them.
• 🤝 Community matters, especially in niche domains. Tax tech has unique challenges—data sensitivity, localization, and regulatory shifts. Events like this help surface real solutions from real teams.

What’s Next

What does it take to scale a tax platform across 100+ countries? This was our first GoTalks, but it won’t be our last. We’re planning to continue supporting the meetup in Zagreb, and we’re exploring similar events in London and other engineering hubs, where tax and fintech systems are being built at serious scale.

If you're working on hard engineering problems in the tax space or want to share your take, we’d love to connect.