Backend Engineering

The system underneath everything else

Backend work is where I spend most of my engineering time API design, database architecture, and the access-control boundaries that determine whether a system is actually safe to use.

Request flow

Frontend → API → Auth → Business Logic → Database → External Services

Frontend

Next.js / React client

API Layer

REST endpoints, routing

Auth

JWT, role scoping

Business Logic

Services, validation

Database

PostgreSQL / SQLite via ORM

External Services

AI models, email, storage

Capabilities

What this looks like in practice

API architecture & RESTful design

Designing endpoints around resources and consistent response contracts every mutating route returns the full resulting object, not a bare status code, so clients never have to guess or re-fetch.

Database architecture

Schema design with SQLAlchemy across PostgreSQL and SQLite, with explicit foreign-key relationships and query-time scoping enforced at the data-access layer, not left to the caller.

Authentication & authorization

JWT-based auth with role scoping handled in middleware rather than duplicated per route built out across four distinct roles on Uzima Link.

Security

Treating access-control boundaries as part of the data model: a query that can't return another user's records is a stronger guarantee than a check that might be forgotten in a new route.

Scalability & performance

Structuring long-running work (like AI extraction calls) asynchronously so slow external dependencies don't block the rest of a request flow.

Error handling, logging & debugging

Comfortable tracing subtle failures back to root cause a missing mime_type on an audio upload, an unscoped query rather than working around symptoms.

Testing & documentation

Testing endpoint contracts and permission boundaries directly, and writing down technical decisions so the reasoning behind an architecture choice is recoverable later.

Deployment & system design

Running frontend and backend as separately deployed services with correctly configured CORS, and designing system diagrams before writing implementation code.

Case studies