Backend Lead & Engineering Manager
I lead a backend team of more than six engineers and still design the systems we ship. Six years in, across two domains: edtech first, then regulated fintech.
Measure delivery, not activity. DORA metrics through Swarmia: how often we ship, how long a change takes to get out, how often it breaks, how fast we recover.
What I deliberately do not measure: hours logged, who is online, time at a desk. That is noise, and measuring it teaches a team to optimise the wrong thing.
Decisions get written down. RFCs and PRDs before the code, so the argument happens once and the reasoning outlives the people who had it. I built the documentation system the team works from — architecture, standards, playbooks — because a practice that lives in one person's head is not a standard.
❝ The competent programmer is fully aware of the limited size of his own skull. ❞ — Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, EWD340
Technical debt is a line in the roadmap, not a complaint in a retro. Written down, prioritised against features, paid on purpose.
Review at scale. I automate the mechanical half of code review with AI, so the team spends its attention on design instead of on style.
Growing the people, not just the codebase. 1:1s, career development, hiring and onboarding, and running the workshops that unblock a team faster than answering the same question six times.
Planning and roadmap, performance, error monitoring, and keeping the bug funnel from quietly becoming a second backlog.
| Domain | Stack | What I work on |
|---|---|---|
| Fintech · current | Python · Django · FastAPI · microservices · PostgreSQL · MongoDB · OpenSearch | Started in compliance and KYC, now across the platform: transfer agency, portfolio management, reporting, Odoo |
| Edtech | PHP · Yii2 · Angular · Firebase | Full stack and third-party integration, including a 7.4 → 8.2 migration, a role-based access control layer, and Microsoft Teams Education |
Hexagonal architecture and DDD, in production rather than in a diagram: Python and Django microservices structured by domain, integrated with external systems through queues, webhooks and OpenSearch.
A number I am proud of: test coverage on the compliance modules taken to 92%, alongside paying down the technical debt around them. Compliance is where an untested branch stops being a bug and starts being an audit finding.
Also: SQL query optimisation and data pipelines, dynamic KYC review flows driven by roles, and a Four Eyes control migrated into the monitoring process.
The domain before the framework, and a test suite you trust enough to deploy on a Friday. Software that is still cheap to change in year three is the whole objective.
❝ Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence! ❞ — Edsger W. Dijkstra, Notes on Structured Programming, 1970
❝ The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. ❞ — Donald E. Knuth, Computer Programming as an Art, Turing Award lecture, 1974
| Languages | Python · PHP · TypeScript |
| Frameworks | Django · FastAPI · Yii2 |
| Data & search | PostgreSQL · MongoDB · OpenSearch |
| Integration | Queues · webhooks · Odoo |
| Front | Angular · Firebase |
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| engineering-notes | A reading notebook on engineering and technical leadership: architecture, code quality, backend, delivery and career. 63 notes that had scattered across folders and eight repositories, found and put in order. |
Most of what I work on is private. This list grows as that changes rather than being padded to look longer.
❝ Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. ❞
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, EWD498, 1975