Open to SDE2 / SDE3 / SDE4 roles in product-focused teams and startups.

Backend heavy Full Stack Engineer | Scalable Systems · Real-time APIs · Cloud Infrastructure

Backend-focused full stack engineer with experience designing and shipping high-throughput APIs, event-driven systems, and cloud-native platforms for fast-moving product teams.

Focus areas
Distributed systemsReal-time APIsData-intensive backends
Architecture
Event-driven designDomain-driven modelingResilient integrations
Ways of working
Design docsProduction ownershipMetrics & observability

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Skills, projects, system design, experience — answers stream live from the backend AI service.

Engineering skill set

Depth across backend, systems, and production operations.

Backend Engineering

Depth

Designing predictable, maintainable backends that prioritize correctness, observability, and operational simplicity.

  • REST and RPC-style APIs with clear contracts and versioning
  • Async workers and background job pipelines
  • Performance profiling, hotspots analysis, and targeted optimization

Node.js · TypeScript · Go (working) · Python · gRPC

System Design & Architecture

Depth

End-to-end ownership from requirements to design docs, diagrams, and production rollout plans.

  • Event-driven and message-based architectures
  • Domain-driven design for complex product domains
  • Designing for graceful degradation and failure isolation

Event sourcing · CQRS (pragmatic) · Design docs · ADR

Databases & Storage

Depth

Schema design, query optimization, and data modeling for transactional and analytical workloads.

  • Modeling transactional systems with strong consistency guarantees
  • Indexing strategies and query optimization
  • Data migrations with minimal downtime and safe rollbacks

PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · MongoDB · S3-compatible stores

Real-time & Event-driven Systems

Depth

Building reliable, low-latency systems with predictable behavior under varying load.

  • WebSocket and long-polling APIs
  • Pub/sub messaging and fan-out patterns
  • Backpressure, rate limiting, and throttling strategies

Kafka · RabbitMQ · Redis Streams · WebSockets

Cloud & DevOps

Depth

Practical understanding of how code behaves in production — not just locally.

  • Containerized services with clear resource limits
  • Staging, canary, and blue/green deployments
  • Metrics, dashboards, alerts, and SLO-based thinking

Docker · Kubernetes (working) · AWS / GCP · Terraform · CI/CD

Frontend & Product Integration

Depth

Enough frontend depth to build reliable internal tools and production-ready user flows on top of strong backends.

  • API-first UI development with typed clients
  • State management for data-heavy dashboards
  • Performance-aware rendering and UX for complex workflows

React · TypeScript · Tailwind · SPA patterns

Featured engineering work

Production-grade systems focused on correctness and scale.

Selected projects that showcase backend depth, system design, and pragmatic scaling — not toy apps or UI clones.

Scalable Form Builder Platform

Lead backend & architecture

Backend-heavy
Problem
Product teams needed a way to ship complex, conditional forms without pushing new deployments for every change.
Architecture
Multi-tenant form engine backed by a schema-driven configuration store, with a versioned DSL for form definitions and a runtime evaluator.
Key challenges
Safely executing user-defined logic at scale · Keeping form rendering performant on low-end devices · Designing a migration strategy for evolving the form DSL
Scalability
Isolated tenants, rate-limited evaluation, and a cache layer for frequently accessed form definitions. Heavy use of read replicas for analytics queries.

Node.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Redis · React

Real-time Notification System

Backend engineer

Backend-heavy
Problem
Existing system could not reliably deliver notifications across channels (email, push, in-app) with ordering guarantees and idempotency.
Architecture
Event-driven notification pipeline using a message bus, channel-specific workers, and a delivery log for idempotency and replay.
Key challenges
Guaranteeing at-least-once delivery without spamming users · Per-tenant rate limiting and quiet hours support · Tracing notification lifecycle end-to-end for debugging
Scalability
Horizontal scaling via partitioned topics, shard-aware workers, and bulk fan-out strategies. Backpressure and dead-letter queues for problematic events.

Node.js · Kafka · Redis · PostgreSQL · WebSockets

Subscription & Payment System

Backend engineer

Backend-heavy
Problem
Need for a robust subscription engine with proration, trials, discounts, and multiple payment providers.
Architecture
Isolated billing domain service that integrates with external payment gateways, exposes idempotent APIs, and maintains its own ledger for auditability.
Key challenges
Handling retries and webhooks without double-charging · Reconciling provider events with internal state · Designing a clear abstraction that allows swapping providers
Scalability
Queue-based webhook processing, batched reconciliation jobs, and a materialized view for customer billing overviews.

Node.js · PostgreSQL · Redis · Stripe / Braintree

Universal File Preview Platform

Full stack engineer

Backend-heavy
Problem
Teams needed a unified way to preview heterogeneous file types (documents, media, archives) in the browser without leaking sensitive data.
Architecture
Ingestion pipeline that normalizes files into a preview-friendly format, with signed URLs, access controls, and an isolated rendering sandbox.
Key challenges
Processing large files without blocking user requests · Securing previews for private and shared resources · Handling degraded previews when full fidelity is impossible
Scalability
Chunked uploads, background processing workers, and tiered storage. CDN cached previews for frequently accessed assets.

Node.js · S3-compatible storage · Lambda/workers · React

System design thinking

Pragmatic architectures for real-world constraints.

Short design snapshots for common product-critical systems — focused on trade-offs, failure modes, and operational realities.

Payment Systems

Correctness, idempotency, and auditability.

System design
Architecture overview
Designs payment flows as state machines with explicit transitions, isolating billing from core product logic and treating payment providers as external dependencies.
Scaling strategy
Queue-based webhook handlers, retry-safe APIs, and periodic reconciliation jobs to keep internal ledgers consistent with providers.
Bottlenecks
Provider latency, long-tail retries, and poorly modeled edge cases such as partial refunds and chargebacks.
Trade-offs
Balancing strict consistency in ledgers with eventual consistency in user-facing UIs, and deciding where to lean on provider abstractions versus custom logic.

Notification Systems

Multi-channel delivery with observability.

System design
Architecture overview
Separates notification intent (what happened) from delivery strategy (how, when, and where it is sent). Central event log with channel-specific workers.
Scaling strategy
Topic partitioning by tenant and channel, bulk fan-out workers, and per-channel rate limits with backoff strategies.
Bottlenecks
Third-party provider APIs, bursty traffic patterns, and poorly configured retries.
Trade-offs
Immediate delivery vs. batching, rich personalization vs. template reuse, and per-user vs. per-tenant rate limiting.

Chat Systems

Real-time performance with predictable costs.

System design
Architecture overview
Room-based architecture with WebSocket gateways, message fan-out via pub/sub, and a durable message store with pagination and search.
Scaling strategy
Sharded gateways, partitioned topics, and tiered storage for hot vs. cold conversations.
Bottlenecks
Hot rooms with high fan-out, presence tracking at scale, and reconnect storms after outages.
Trade-offs
Consistency vs. latency for message ordering, central vs. edge presence tracking, and indexing strategy for search.

Scalable APIs

Contracts, observability, and failure isolation.

System design
Architecture overview
API gateway fronting modular services, with strict schemas, typed clients, and consistent error and pagination models.
Scaling strategy
Horizontal scaling with stateless services, circuit breakers, and aggressive caching for read-heavy endpoints.
Bottlenecks
Downstream dependencies, N+1 patterns across services, and unbounded payload sizes.
Trade-offs
Coupling degree between gateway and services, monolith vs. service split, and synchronous vs. async boundaries.

Form Builder Platforms

Flexibility without sacrificing control.

System design
Architecture overview
Schema- and DSL-driven form engine with a runtime evaluator, clear versioning, and safe rollout of new capabilities.
Scaling strategy
Caching form definitions, precomputing validations, and using lightweight runtime execution sandboxes.
Bottlenecks
Complex conditional logic, nested repeatable sections, and cross-field dependencies.
Trade-offs
Expressiveness of the DSL vs. runtime complexity, central vs. client-side evaluation, and storage format evolution over time.

Experience

Operating in startup, consulting, and product environments.

  1. Product engineering

    Backend heavy full stack engineer

    Recent

    Working with early- to growth-stage product teams on critical backend-heavy initiatives.

    • Owned backend architecture and implementation for greenfield products.
    • Introduced design doc practices and production readiness checklists.
    • Collaborated closely with founders, product, and design for fast iteration.
  2. Early-stage startups

    Founding / early backend engineer

    Earlier

    Joined lean teams as the primary owner of backend, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

    • Shipped MVPs to production under tight timelines with pragmatic trade-offs.
    • Instrumented critical paths with metrics, logging, and tracing from day one.
    • Managed migrations, deployment pipelines, and on-call rotations.
  3. Freelance & consulting

    Backend & system design consultant

    Parallel

    Partnered with teams to diagnose scaling issues, redesign APIs, and simplify complex backends.

    • Audited architectures, identified bottlenecks, and proposed concrete remediation steps.
    • Created internal tooling to reduce operational overhead and manual work.
    • Ran focused sessions on system design and production readiness.
  4. Independent projects

    Product and tooling builder

    Ongoing

    Building and iterating on internal tools, SaaS experiments, and infrastructure utilities.

    • Exploring opinionated templates for backend-heavy SaaS products.
    • Experimenting with observability and developer experience tooling.
    • Documenting learnings in public where appropriate.

Engineering notes

Deep dives into scalability, correctness, and infrastructure.

A selection of topics that reflect how problems are approached — from APIs and payments to real-time systems and observability.

API scalability

Designing APIs that scale beyond the first client

Lessons from evolving APIs from one client and a handful of endpoints to multi-tenant, high-traffic systems without breaking consumers.

Versioning strategies · Pagination and filtering · Schema-first development

Draft topics — can be linked to a blog or docs.

Internal notes (no public link yet)

Payment systems

Payment idempotency in the real world

Practical patterns for making payment flows idempotent in the presence of retries, webhooks, and external provider quirks.

Idempotency keys · Retries · Webhooks · Reconciliation

Draft topics — can be linked to a blog or docs.

Internal notes (no public link yet)

Real-time systems

Architecting real-time features without over-complicating everything

How to choose between WebSockets, polling, and streams, and how to layer real-time features on top of existing products.

Transport choices · Backpressure · Operational costs

Draft topics — can be linked to a blog or docs.

Internal notes (no public link yet)

Infrastructure

Infra design for small teams with serious requirements

Designing infrastructure stacks that a small team can realistically operate while meeting uptime, latency, and compliance goals.

Cluster design · Deployment · SLOs · Runbooks

Draft topics — can be linked to a blog or docs.

Internal notes (no public link yet)

Contact

Discuss a role, a product, or a specific problem space.

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