Greater Toronto Area, Canada
I live at the intersection of backend systems and agentic AI, with experience building products that ship to hundreds of thousands of users. My focus is on the hard parts of production AI: making intelligent, agentic systems fast, reliable, and cost-effective at scale. I enjoy working across the full stack of that problem: backend architecture, LLM optimization, prompt engineering, and infrastructure. I'm drawn to early-stage, high-impact work: taking features from 0 to 1, navigating ambiguity, and driving technical decisions that shape product direction. I find the most satisfaction when complex engineering problems translate into real impact. Outside of AI, I have deep experience building scalable backend systems across fintech, e-commerce, and developer tooling. Always eager to connect with folks working on interesting problems. Let's chat! 🤝
Senior Backend Engineer on GitLab's AI Engineering division, serving as the organization-wide DRI and domain expert for Duo Code Review (https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/merge_requests/duo_in_merge_requests/#use-gitlab-duo-to-review-your-code). Maintainer of two critical projects: the GitLab monolith (backend) (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) and AI Gateway (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/modelops/applied-ml/code-suggestions/ai-assist).
🤖 AI Engineering → Served as organization-wide DRI for Duo Code Review, architecting and delivering its integration into the Duo Agent Platform (DAP) as one of its first foundational GA flows and DAP's most widely used agentic flow — unlocking the feature for Core and Pro tier customers while preserving the classic experience for Enterprise → Reduced cost per Duo Code Review flow by ~70% through LLM call and token consumption optimizations, directly unblocking leadership approval for flat-rate pricing and closing a critical competitive gap with industry alternatives → Optimized DAP flow execution time from ~10 minutes to under 60 seconds by eliminating an LLM-based XML formatting bottleneck, simplifying architecture and resolving LLM behavioural inconsistencies → Led Custom Instructions feature end-to-end from concept to production, driving full customer rollout by validating on internal MRs and iterating on prompts based on real usage patterns → Owned sharding of a critical high-traffic table for GitLab's Cells infrastructure, delivering zero-downtime migrations across performance-sensitive paths while eliminating months of backfill time
📈 Growth Team → Improved the Admin interface to provide direct access to stock data, reducing tech support reliance, streamlining over 1K monthly queries and enabling faster resolution of customer inquiries. → Spearheaded Netsuite Inventory & Catalog Sync project, automating data synchronization, reducing manual workload by 20 hours per week and ensuring real-time accuracy. → Led the planning and execution of key metrics using Yabeda & Prometheus, creating visual dashboards on Grafana to enhance data visualization and monitoring capabilities. → Identified and resolved a critical security vulnerability in authentication token handling, improving system security by replacing query parameter transmission with secure header-based mechanisms. → Optimized product ingredient display by resolving an N+1 query issue, reducing database queries from hundreds to two and improving load times by 75%.
💱 Foreign Exchange Team → Implemented an auto-installation strategy for the geolocation app in Ruby for eligible merchants, which boosted international transactions volume by over $10M. → Redesigned the communication flow between app URLs, routers, and frontend components to resolve a major XSS security vulnerability. → Boosted code robustness and reduced API response time by approximately 65% by refactoring microservices using the factory pattern. → Collaborated with external partners to create scalable database tables for storing foreign exchange rates, ensuring consistency in displayed amounts for merchants and partners. → Conducted thorough system checks and load testing to ensure seamless service during high-traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, ensuring uninterrupted service for merchants and buyers.
→ Co-founded SharkSquad, a full-stack engineering company, focused on providing secure and scalable software solutions. → Led a cross-functional team in delivering custom software solutions tailored to clients' unique needs. → Fostered a culture of innovation and collaboration, consistently exceeding client expectations. → Worked closely with clients to ensure business goals were met through strategic and high-quality project delivery.
→ Improved merchant trust in fees by implementing APIs that provide a detailed transaction fee breakdown system. → Resolved discrepancies in fixed amount discounts, leading to a 15% increase in discount usage rate. → Deployed logging to capture system issues and errors for future analysis and rectification of system crashes.