Pawel N.

Top Rated Plus Senior Symfony & PHP engineer specializing in fast turnaround through deep domain mastery - fixing the root cause in 3 hours costs less than 20 hours of guessing. I partner with founders and CTOs to untangle complex code, tune database performance, and deploy scalable platforms without downtime or hand-holding. Over 1,500+ logged hours on Upwork with a 100% Job Success Score. If you’re running a growing platform or e-commerce business, you don’t need an engineer who requires babysitting or endless ticket grooming. You need a senior technical partner who thrives on tough problems - someone who can dive into an unfamiliar codebase, diagnose the root cause, explain trade-offs clearly, and deliver production-ready solutions across your backend, servers, and data stack. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ VERIFIED UPWORK CLIENT REVIEWS: (Verifiable in my work history below) 💬 "Pawel understood what we needed to do for this project and explained the various solution options with the trade-offs of each. Further he reviewed on his own..." ($7.4k contract - Amazon/Shopify data & reporting) 💬 "Pawel had to work with extremely old and complicated SQL queries, buggy PHP code... and general lack of code and business logic." ($15.5k contract) 💬 "Pawel was able to achieve what others have not been able to achieve for us in years. We now have a robust, bug-free website with amazing features." ($14k+ contract) 💬 "Pawel is a phenomenal backend developer who transformed our massive ecommerce website from a bug-filled legacy system into a high-functioning site with perfect technical SEO." ($13.4k contract) 💬 "He has developed clever solutions for all of our problems and questions, delivered high-quality work and finished each milestone on time." (4-year long-term client) ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ HOW I APPROACH PROBLEM SOLVING: • Root-Cause Diagnosis over Quick Patches: When queries bottleneck, APIs slow down, or 504 timeouts spike, I don’t just throw bigger hardware at the problem. I profile SQL execution plans (`EXPLAIN`), trace PHP-FPM execution, and tune Nginx configs to eliminate the structural defect. • Pragmatic Trade-Offs: Every architectural decision balances speed-to-market, maintenance burden, and cloud costs. I lay out the options transparently before writing code so you can make informed business decisions. • Autonomous Troubleshooting: Even with undocumented legacy systems or missing business logic, I analyze the code independently and present working solutions instead of endless questions. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CORE AREAS OF EXPERTISE: 1. Autonomous Backend Architecture (Symfony & Modern PHP) • Deep mastery of Symfony (v4 through v7, Components, Doctrine ORM, API Platform, EasyAdmin). • Legacy modernization: refactoring monolithic codebases safely and designing scalable RESTful & GraphQL APIs. • Clean, secure object-oriented architecture built to strict PSR standards. 2. E-Commerce Data Pipelines & Business Intelligence • Modern ELT Pipelines: Extracting, loading, and transforming data using Python (`dlt` - data load tool) directly into Google BigQuery. • Ad & Marketplace API Integrations: Syncing data from Meta Ads API, Google Ads API, Amazon SP-API, Walmart Marketplace, and Shopify. • Executive Analytics: Building automated dashboards and business reports in Looker Studio to give decision-makers instant visibility into revenue, marketing spend, and inventory metrics. 3. Database Internals & Query Optimization (MySQL & PostgreSQL) • Resolving sluggish database queries through targeted indexing strategies, execution plan profiling, and query restructuring. • Reducing database load under traffic spikes using Redis caching and session management. • Handling high-volume transactional and analytical datasets. 4. Server Administration & DevOps Ownership (Linux / LEMP) • Complete server management: Nginx reverse proxies, PHP-FPM pool sizing, SSL configuration, and server hardening. • Rapid diagnosis and resolution of critical production outages, 502/504 gateway timeouts, memory leaks, and redirect loops. • Cloud deployments and infrastructure management across AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Azure (including Upwork Enterprise client projects). 5. Modern Full-Stack & Smart Integrations • Frontend: Clean React interfaces, TypeScript, and modern JS UI integration. • Practical AI Workflows: Integrating LLM pipelines and generative features via OpenAI & Fal APIs. • Workflow Automation: Custom Shopify apps/themes and complex integrations via Make (Integromat) / Zapier. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WORKING TOGETHER: You work directly with me - no project managers, no communication lag. Whether you have an urgent production bottleneck, an e-commerce data pipeline to automate, or need an experienced partner for your next development milestone: Send me a message with a quick overview of your current tech stack or the challenge you're solving, and let's discuss the cleanest path forward.