Backend Engineer

How I currently practice backend engineering

I have not held a paid Backend Engineer title yet. This page documents student and volunteer backend projects with clearly defined scope and limitations.

What I have

Personal APIs deployed on small hosting providers for demonstration purposes.
Local FastAPI experiments to learn backend service patterns.
Documentation that lists missing features and risks.

What I don’t have yet

Ownership of production backend systems or high-traffic services.
Deep observability with tracing and alerting.
Large-scale data modeling and migrations.

What I’m doing next

Auth hardening (refresh tokens, auditing, device trust).
Schema migration practice for relational databases.
Async job queues and caching experiments.

Personal deployments (public, small-scale)

Node and Express APIs for Car-Match, deployed on Render with MongoDB Atlas.
Free-tier cold starts can take several minutes; this limitation is documented in the README.
README documentation lists missing features such as authentication hardening, load testing, and observability.

Local experiments (learning)

FastAPI experiments for Convo-AI to understand Python-based backend services.
AI-assisted pair programming in development sessions; prompts and edits are included in the repository for traceability.

Car-Match API

Express and MongoDB CRUD routes deployed on Render; JWT authentication functions once the free instance is active.
API documentation is maintained in Postman collections and README tables; no OpenAPI generation is implemented.
Repository issues track missing features including rate limiting, structured logging, and startup performance improvements.

Proof links: Case study, GitHub

Secrets Management tutorial

Side-by-side examples of secure and insecure patterns for handling secrets in demo workflows.
Used for personal learning and blog content; not deployed to production environments.
Disclosure: large portions were scaffolded with ChatGPT and Copilot before manual annotation.

Proof links: EthicsFrontEndDemo repo, EthicsFrontEndDemo Live demo

Node.js + Express (comfortable for prototypes)TypeScript (learning)MongoDB / Mongoose (learning)PostgreSQL basics (exploring)FastAPI (exploring)Jest + Supertest (learning)Postman collections (comfortable)

Each repository documents areas of strength and areas where AI tools or tutorials were heavily used.

Designing auth flows that include refresh tokens, device trust, and auditing.
Schema design + migrations for relational databases (beyond toy schemas).
Observability + tracing for Express/FastAPI services.
Performance profiling, caching strategies, and async job processing.

If you mentor junior backend engineers in these topics, I am open to discussing opportunities.

Backend Engineer

How I currently practice backend engineering

Clear scope, upfront

What I have

What I don’t have yet

What I’m doing next

Where I actually spend time

Personal deployments (public, small-scale)

Local experiments (learning)

What I can show today

Car-Match API

Secrets Management tutorial

Stacks I reach for

Gaps I’m working through