Response body — /capabilities
The work happens
where systems meet reality.
What I do, broken down by where it lives in the stack.
Not a skills list — a working understanding of where things break.
Response metadata
01
Backend & APIs
Designing services that survive their second year of growth.
- → REST + event-driven API design
- → Payment workflows + idempotency at the boundary
- → Auth: JWT, RBAC, multi-tenant isolation
- → Async pipelines via message queues (RabbitMQ, SQS)
- → Reconciliation jobs for "the gateway confirmed but our webhook didn't"
02
Data & Databases
Schemas that don't need a migration every quarter.
- → PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB — relational where it earns its keep
- → Index strategy, query plans, the boring observability that catches the slow query before the alert does
- → Multi-tenant isolation patterns (per-tenant DB, shared DB / per-tenant schema, row-level)
- → Event sourcing for distributed reconciliation
03
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS Solutions Architect, but I think in cost-per-feature, not service names.
- → EC2, RDS, S3, VPC fundamentals — networking, IAM, security groups
- → Cost optimization that survived a 40% reduction without ops regression
- → Deployment pipelines (CI/CD) that fail loudly and recover safely
- → Observability: structured logs, metrics, traces — the boring kind that pays off at 3am
04
Practice & people
Engineering moves at the speed of trust.
- → Code reviews that prioritize learning over gatekeeping
- → Architecture decision records — write the why down once, save the same conversation ten times
- → Mentoring junior engineers from "ticket-takers" to "system thinkers"
- → Stakeholder translation — explaining trade-offs without the jargon
A note on tools
I list TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and AWS because they're what I reach for first — but the answer to "what stack?" is almost always "the one your team can operate at 3am six months from now." I pick tools that match the operating model, not the resume.