ittsel

I build backend systems that carry real load and stay boring under it. Over about twelve years I have worked on a real-time bidding platform at Samsung Ads handling four million bid requests an hour, where I led the OKTA authentication integration end to end and was given the Hidden Gem Award for it, worked with the security team and architecture review board on PII encryption and cross-region deployments, and helped move the platform from a Rails monolith toward Go microservices, a migration I had already run once at BlackBerry on the tooling that managed their cloud resources worldwide. I am now a Senior Software Engineer at Inspired Thinking Group on the ReviewStudio team, and on my own time I designed and shipped Thalmas end to end: a native Swift iOS app on the App Store, a FastAPI and Postgres backend, and an LLM pipeline whose hard problems were cost and measured precision rather than prompts. I care about the unglamorous parts: production incidents, review standards a team will actually keep, and specs someone else can implement without asking me. Based in Montreal, open to senior backend and platform roles.