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Work / Expertise

What I'm good at, with the specifics.

Six areas where I do my deepest work. Each one is backed by systems I've shipped to production, not a list of keywords.

01

Backend Engineering

Node.js / TypeScript services that carry real business logic and real traffic. Migrated a core message-routing service (the 'Sorter') from PHP to Node.js, improving performance and maintainability of the most critical component in the system.

Node.jsTypeScriptSequelizeREST / GraphQL
02

Cloud Architecture

AWS-native, event-driven systems built as code. Owned an end-to-end migration of high-scale infrastructure from console-managed resources to AWS CDK — compute, messaging, data, ingress, and network — with reusable patterns and CI/CD guardrails that make changes reviewable and drift-resistant.

AWSCDK / IaCLambdaSQSServerless
03

Data Pipelines

Change-data-capture and streaming pipelines that keep systems in sync. Built a Debezium → MSK (Kafka) → OpenSearch Ingestion path that replaced a slower DMS + Kinesis design and removed the bottleneck where large runs blocked new indexing.

DebeziumKafka / MSKKinesisCDC
04

Search Infrastructure

OpenSearch ingestion and indexing at scale. Re-architected the ingestion pipeline so indexing 1M records dropped from 240 minutes to 6 minutes — roughly 40× faster — while keeping new writes flowing during large backfills.

OpenSearchIngestionIndexing strategy
05

Database Performance

MySQL / Aurora and PostgreSQL under genuine pressure. Optimized a production reporting table with over a billion rows using denormalization, partitioning, cursor pagination, replicas, caching, indexing, and query guardrails.

MySQL / AuroraPostgreSQLIndexingQuery tuning
06

Reliability & Systems Design

Distributed, event-driven systems designed to be observable and affordable. Rebuilt a customer-facing Inbox to cut response times by ~95%, and reduced monthly cloud spend from $30k to $22.5k through IaC-led infrastructure modernization, right-sizing, and architecture changes.

Distributed systemsObservabilityCost / FinOps