Principal Backend & Data Architect

Hands-on principal engineer with 20+ years across backend systems, data-heavy products, search/retrieval, internal tools, and founder-led product work. Experienced as a Technical co-founder, CTO/CPO, architect, fractional technical lead, and engineering owner. Works best where the business goal is clear but the technical shape still needs senior ownership, including unclear requirements, fragmented tools and data, API boundaries, retrieval quality, and architecture that has to stay understandable as the product grows. Capable of owning technical architecture and system shape, staying close to implementation to ensure latency, operability, failure modes, and tradeoffs are grounded in reality. Works across the whole product system: internal tools, backend services, data/retrieval layers, API contracts, observability, and production behavior. Selected work includes: Fractional principal engineer/architect for a ground-up KPI/analytics platform rewrite (5-person team); Technical founder/CTO/CPO for a market-intelligence SaaS involving live matching of 1M+ dynamic segments against continuous on-chain/off-chain streams, with ClickHouse-backed pipelines processing billions of rows/day; Marketplace search/matching rewrite (Elasticsearch, percolator-style saved searches, high-volume notification infrastructure) while keeping the live platform in production. Best fit for backend-heavy products, analytics/data infrastructure, complex internal tools, search/retrieval systems, or early-stage teams that need architecture + implementation depth without a large engineering org.