Senior Backend Engineer · AI-Accelerated Delivery

10+ years building backend systems that hold up — now shipping full-stack products at AI speed.

I design systems that survive production load, and build them faster by pairing a decade of engineering judgment with modern AI tooling.

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About

Engineering judgment, AI-speed execution.

A decade in high-stakes systems

10+ years building backend systems for consumer finance, banking, and financial-market infrastructure — environments where bugs cost money and downtime isn't an option.

AI as a delivery multiplier

Full-stack capable, and in the AI era that's the multiplier: modern AI tooling lets me deliver full-stack products at a pace close to a small team, without losing the rigor that keeps systems stable in production.

Judgment, not just output

AI tools don't give you judgment — knowing what to build, what to skip, and how to avoid the mistakes that turn into 3am pages. That's what a decade in production systems buys you.

Services

What I can take off your plate

From production-grade backend systems to AI-accelerated full-stack builds — pick the engagement that matches where you are.

Backend & System Architecture

API design, microservices, database design and optimization, and systems built to hold up under real production load.

Legacy Modernization

Monolith-to-microservices breakups, zero-downtime data migrations, and paying down technical debt without breaking what already works.

AI-Accelerated Full-Stack Delivery

MVPs and small-to-mid full-stack products, shipped fast by pairing a decade of engineering judgment with modern AI tooling.

Code Review & Technical Audit

A structured review of your existing code or architecture, with a prioritized, plain-English plan for what to fix first.

Selected Work

Real problems, real production systems

Most of my work has been for banks, exchanges, and government agencies under strict confidentiality. Details below are anonymized — no client names or internal data — but every result is real.

Consumer Finance / Banking

Reliability Fix & Process Automation

Backend Engineer

Challenge

A core loan-guarantee API had a long-standing intermittent failure, and promotional coupon issuance was hardcoded per campaign, requiring a code change for every new offer.

Approach

Traced the business flow and legacy code paths to isolate the root cause of the failure, then rebuilt coupon issuance as a configurable module — amount, eligible product, frequency, and conditions — so campaigns no longer required engineering time.

Result

Cut the API's error rate from ~5,000 failures/day to near-zero, with only residual network jitter remaining. Coupon campaigns moved from hardcoded releases to self-service configuration.

Consumer Finance / Banking

Property Valuation & Digital Loan Application

Backend Engineer

Challenge

A housing-secured loan product needed real-time property valuation and a streamlined digital application flow that call-center agents could trigger for both existing members and new, unregistered leads.

Approach

Integrated a third-party valuation API and computed a rolling 12-month price trend. Built a unified entry point handling encrypted property data for both registered and non-registered users, backed by Redis caching for fast multi-property lookups, plus the order-creation and data-validation pipeline behind the simplified application flow.

Result

Shipped a compliant, high-performance valuation service supporting concurrent multi-property queries, and a streamlined application flow adopted as the product's primary intake path.

Consumer Finance / Banking

Zero-Downtime Database Migration — Oracle to MySQL

Backend Engineer

Challenge

A live, revenue-critical lending system needed to move its data layer from Oracle to MySQL without downtime or data loss.

Approach

Designed a four-phase cutover using the adapter pattern with dual-write and dual-read comparison — Oracle only, then dual-write with Oracle reads, then dual-read with consistency checks, then MySQL reads with dual-write — validating consistency at every phase before advancing, then removing the adapter layer and legacy code once stable.

Result

Migrated a live production system with zero downtime and zero data discrepancies, fully decommissioning the legacy database dependency.

Live Demos

Click through the kind of systems I build

Client systems stay confidential, so these rebuild them with fictional data: real APIs, realistic workflows, nothing to sign up for.

See all demos

Back office for a consumer lending team

Loan Operations Console

Search and filter loan applications, follow each one through underwriting, disbursement and repayment, with a full audit trail.

Faceted search
Status workflow
Audit log
REST API

Open live demo

Portfolio metrics for lending operations

Lending KPI Dashboard

Disbursement volume, delinquency rate and conversion funnel, with drill-down by product, channel and date range.

Aggregations
Time series
Drill-down
CSV export

Open live demo

Zero-downtime Oracle → MySQL cutover

Migration Consistency Monitor

Track a four-phase database migration: dual-write comparison per table, diff records side by side, and consistency trends.

Dual-write checks
Diff inspection
Phase tracking
Data integrity

Open live demo

Additional enterprise engagements

Backend services for a securities/futures exchange: member service platforms, asset custody & registration systems, margin-inquiry services, and OTC market infrastructure.
Government administrative systems: a unified business-management platform and an official document/case processing platform.

Details limited by client confidentiality — happy to discuss role and scope in an interview.

Skills

Toolbox

Deep in Java backend systems, comfortable across the stack, and increasingly fast with AI-assisted tooling.

Backend

Data

Frontend

Infra / Cloud

AI-Assisted Delivery

How I Work

A simple, transparent process

Discovery

Understand the goal, constraints, and what success actually looks like.

Proposal

A clear scope, timeline, and price before any code gets written.

Build

Iterative delivery with regular, transparent progress updates.

Handover

Clean documentation, a working handoff, and optional ongoing support.

Contact

Have a project in mind?

Tell me what you're building. I'll reply with honest feedback on scope, timeline, and whether I'm the right fit.

support@tidelightstudio.com