Goran T.Private profile: Upwork shows its earnings only to signed-in members, so we check it every few weeks, not daily. MRR here is a rough estimate (Upwork's six-month earnings ÷ months active). Last read Nov 5, 2026.

I build AI systems that hold up under real load, and I have 30 years of backend depth behind them. Most recent project: a complete local-first RAG platform, built solo in 10 days. 40,000 lines, 849 tests, 21 architecture decision records, all green. Plenty of people can call a model API. Fewer can tell you what happens when it returns garbage at 2 am, when a tool call has to reach into your billing system, or when a customer tries to talk your support agent into issuing a refund. I have built that layer, not in a notebook. WHAT I DO AI engineering, hands-on + Retrieval Augmented Generation: extract, chunk, embed, hybrid retrieve, grounded generation with citations. Vector search and BM25 fused with Reciprocal Rank Fusion, not a vector-only demo + Agent and tool calling loops written from scratch, with grounding guardrails enforced in code rather than in prompt instructions + Model Context Protocol servers, exposing your systems as tools to Claude and any MCP client + Local and offline inference with Ollama, and hosted providers behind the same interface + ML pipelines: address matching and deduplication at scale, combining hand-written string algorithms with a trained model behind a service boundary + Agentic systems: intent detection, tool calls against a live service layer, jailbreak and prompt injection filtering Backend engineering and architecture + Python, FastAPI, Django, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, Apache Kafka, AWS, Docker + Provider-seam design, so storage, models and infrastructure can be swapped by configuration instead of rewritten + Event-driven and service-oriented systems designed to be extended rather than rebuilt + 18 production integrations across payment gateways, logistics providers, loyalty programs and travel booking APIs Fractional CTO and technical advisory + Architecture review and technical due diligence + Build versus buy analysis, technology assessment, change management + Team building. I have grown engineering teams from 3 to 15 and led distributed teams across four continents SELECTED WORK Besserwisser, 2026. A local-first knowledge base with RAG chat, built solo. Capture web pages, documents, images, audio, and video into a workspace you own, then ask grounded, cited questions from a Chrome extension, a CLI, a web portal, or any MCP-compatible agent. Models run locally via Ollama, so nothing has to leave the machine. 40,000 lines of Python and TypeScript, 849 tests all passing, 21 architecture decision records with 19 constraints enforced by automated tests. Built in a 10-day window. Pre-launch. AladdinMiles, CTO and co-founder, 2019 to 2026. Architected a loyalty and travel platform from scratch. Customers earn miles on merchant purchases and redeem them into third-party airline frequent flyer programs. I architected and implemented the first version to a rapid MVP, and then continuously as architect and lead engineer. I built the miles and wallet ledger, the multi-tenant merchant model, payments, and logistics layers, then built an agentic customer support system running on top of it. Slide, CTO, 2021 to 2022. Greenfield conversational commerce platform for the Saudi market, hired as CTO from day one. Team grown from 3 to 15, delivered to production. The company raised a $1.75M pre-seed round with participation from Unifonic’s investment arm, UnifonicX. ActivePrime, senior engineer, 2019 to 2020. Address matching and deduplication engine for a US CRM SaaS platform. 1,156 hours on the longest of several sequential contracts, all delivered through Upwork. Nubarron, independent consulting since 2018. $500K+ in self-sourced client revenue across SaaS, fintech, PR, and data platforms. HOW I WORK I ask what you are actually trying to achieve before I tell you how to build it. If it turns out you do not need the thing you asked for, I will say so. Clients rehire me because the systems I leave behind do not need me. I work from Colombia or the EU depending on what suits the project, so I can cover US business hours or European ones. I speak Swedish natively, English at a fully bilingual level, and Spanish with professional proficiency. Contracting runs through my company Nubarron SAS. Rates start at $120/hr for engineering. Architecture reviews and fractional CTO engagements are quoted per scope.