Ralph Bernard Q.

Are you looking for a backend engineer to extend an existing Django application, build reliable APIs, integrate AI into your product, or solve difficult production problems? That's the type of work I enjoy most. I'm a senior backend engineer with 10+ years of professional experience building and maintaining production SaaS applications. I work primarily with Python, Django, PostgreSQL, and modern API-driven architectures, helping technical founders and software teams build reliable backend systems that continue to scale as their products grow. Over the years I've contributed to production SaaS platforms spanning knowledge management, B2B sales intelligence, collaborative editing, AI-powered applications, and commercial project management software. My work has included systems with millions of searchable documents, multi-tenant architectures, real-time collaboration, complex background processing pipelines, and integrations with numerous third-party platforms. My experience includes: * Python * Django, Django REST Framework (DRF), and Django Ninja * PostgreSQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch * REST API design and backend architecture * AI integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic, Retrieval-Augmented Generation) * Stripe subscriptions, billing, and webhooks * Background workers and asynchronous processing * Linux, Docker, cloud deployments (primarily GCP, with AWS experience) * Go for backend services and CLI tools Some examples of the engineering problems I've helped solve include: * Replacing Google Cloud Tasks with a self-hosted django-rq architecture, reducing infrastructure costs while preserving reliable asynchronous processing. * Building automated lead enrichment pipelines that orchestrate multiple external services into resilient, restartable workflows. * Expanding search from PostgreSQL-only queries to Elasticsearch across millions of searchable documents. * Designing backend systems supporting CRDT-based real-time collaboration, AI-powered semantic search, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). * Building payment, subscription, and usage-management systems using Stripe. * Diagnosing production bottlenecks by eliminating N+1 queries, optimizing SQL, and improving response times for customer-facing APIs. I regularly work with: * Third-party API integrations * Multi-tenant SaaS architectures * Search systems * AI-powered application features * Background job orchestration * Performance optimization * Payment systems * Authentication and authorization * Production debugging and maintenance I also use modern AI engineering tools—including Claude Code and Codex—as part of my daily workflow. I use them to accelerate implementation, debugging, testing, and documentation while maintaining manual code review, careful testing, and production-quality engineering standards. AI helps me work more efficiently, but every architectural decision and production change remains an engineering decision. Most of my experience comes from joining existing codebases rather than starting from scratch. I enjoy understanding complex systems, extending them thoughtfully, and delivering features that fit naturally into the existing architecture. Whether it's integrating a new service, improving reliability, optimizing performance, or building entirely new backend capabilities, I aim to leave the codebase cleaner and more maintainable than I found it. Whether you need a long-term backend engineer, help with a complex integration, or someone to solve a difficult production issue, I'd be happy to discuss your project.