[for-hire] Backend Engineer | PhD in CS | Ex-FAANG Staff-Level | For challenging and ambitious backend work

I am a staff-level backend engineer from Germany with a PhD in Computer Science and more than 30 years of experience in developing sophisticated (mobile and server) applications.

I have worked for several Silicon Valley startups and led larger organizations at a FAANG company. I have been instrumental (i.e., hands-on development and leadership) in creating software that runs on more than 2 billion devices and is used by hundreds of millions of users every day. I hold several key patents in the area of network communications and video conferencing.

You want to build a SaaS that's not a run-of-the-mill CRUD wrapper? You have difficult computational tasks and worry about proper scaling? You want to scrape, normalize, and process millions or billions of records? And you want it all done in days instead of months? I can certainly help!

In recent years I have worked as a freelancer on several large-scale, high-complexity backend applications, either alone or as the leader of a small team:

🎧 A podcast aggregator that fetches 2.6 million podcasts with 65+ million episodes every hour, processes all metadata and audio assets, and makes it available via an API used by tens of millions of users per day.

🎬 A real-time video transcription system that reads hundreds of RTMP streams in parallel, extracts and transcribes the audio, overlays the transcription on the video, and re-encodes everything into RTMP or HLS streams.

🦠 A large-scale website security-scanner that has scanned more than 6.5 billion websites and found nearly a million security vulnerabilities, which were then automatically reported to the respective website owners.

👨‍💻 And many, many, many smaller projects, some of them non-backend, like a mobile banking application for iOS that currently holds a 4.9 star rating in the App Store — serving more than 100K happy customers per month.

My tech stack of choice for the backend uses Golang as the programming language, Gitlab or Github for code reviews and continuous integration, simple Docker or Kubernetes for scalable deployments, and AWS or DigitalOcean for cloud infrastructure.

My hourly rate is between 200 and 350 USD, depending on the length and complexity of the engagement.