Available now

I build the systems behind AI products.

Founding engineer, fractional CTO, or a senior/staff backend role. NYC or remote.

I'm CTO at LoanBlocks, where I own the backend end to end — document ingestion, extraction pipelines, and LLM orchestration for institutional lenders.

Three ways to work with me

Different commitments, different stages. Here is what you get in the first month of each.

Founding engineer

Full-time, equity-weighted

Pre-seed to Series A, first or second engineer

  • Stand up the backend, the deploy pipeline, and the on-call story
  • Own the data model and the API surface the next engineers build against
  • Ship the first production version with you, then help hire the team around it

Fractional CTO

10–20 hrs/week

Founders who need technical direction without a full-time hire

  • Architecture review and a roadmap you can hand to a contractor or a new hire
  • Engineering hiring — screening, interview loops, leveling
  • Infrastructure and vendor decisions, including what they cost at your stage

Senior / staff software engineer

Full-time, backend-leaning

Series A onward with an existing team. NYC or remote

  • Backend services in Python and TypeScript on AWS
  • LLM integration that survives a provider outage — retries, backoff, failover
  • High-availability APIs and the ingestion pipelines behind them

What I've shipped

Four things I built, and what happened after.

Andrew Aliaj, backend and AI engineer, based in New York City
Recent work
  • Built the LoanBlocks backend end to end — document ingestion, extraction, and LLM orchestration on AWS, in Python and TypeScript.
  • Designed the PostgreSQL and Prisma schema for Productivity Sumo. Query performance improved 30%.
  • Shipped a Next.js and Go dashboard handling 1M+ daily transactions. Caching took queries from 2s to 200ms.
  • Built an ESG score analyzer on Next.js and FastAPI over 100k+ daily environmental metrics. Won most innovative at a climate hackathon.
How I work

I've been the first engineer twice, which means I've also been the person carrying the pager. That shapes what I build: LLM calls get retries and a second provider because one provider will go down, and I'd rather design the schema once than migrate it under load.

Python
TypeScript
AWS
LLM orchestration

What I work with

Backend and systems first. The frontend is real, it just isn't the reason to hire me.

Where I've used it

LLM orchestration

Multi-provider failover, retries with exponential backoff, and priority-based task routing — at LoanBlocks and in Fleet.

Document pipelines

Ingestion and extraction for credit agreements and covenant review, running on AWS for institutional lenders.

Throughput

A Next.js and Go dashboard handling 1M+ daily transactions with WebSocket streaming.

Query performance

Caching took dashboard queries from 2s to 200ms. Schema design in PostgreSQL and Prisma cut Productivity Sumo query time 30%.

Scale on FastAPI

An ESG score analyzer processing 100k+ daily environmental metrics with sub-second responses.

Zero to production

Productivity Sumo built from scratch — schema, Stripe billing, and Google OAuth. Immpression shipped on React Native over Node, Express, and MongoDB.

Languages

Python icon

Python

TypeScript icon

TypeScript

Go icon

Go

JavaScript icon

JavaScript

Backend and APIs

Node.js icon

Node.js

Express.js icon

Express.js

Django icon

Django

Flask icon

Flask

GraphQL icon

GraphQL

  • FastAPI
  • WebSockets
  • REST

AI and LLM systems

  • LLM orchestration
  • Multi-provider failover
  • Retries and exponential backoff
  • Document ingestion and extraction
  • Priority-based task routing

AWS and infrastructure

AWS icon

AWS

Docker icon

Docker

Kubernetes icon

Kubernetes

Vercel icon

Vercel

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Data

SQL icon

SQL

MongoDB icon

MongoDB

  • PostgreSQL
  • Prisma

Frontend

React icon

React

Next.js icon

Next.js

Tailwind CSS icon

Tailwind CSS

Redux icon

Redux

React Native icon

React Native

React Query icon

React Query

Tools

Git icon

Git

GitHub icon

GitHub

Jest icon

Jest

React Testing Library icon

React Testing Library

Figma icon

Figma

Book an intro call

Tell me what you're building and what you need. I reply within 24–48 hours.

Connect With Me
Find me across the web
Location
Based in the NYC, United States.
Send a Message
I'll get back to you as soon as possible