I’m Alex Kumar, Principal Backend Engineer at Kurai. I specialize in building APIs and backend systems that are fast, reliable, and developer-friendly. My experience at Meta and Stripe has given me a deep understanding of what it takes to build backend infrastructure at scale.
APIs Developers Love
At Stripe, I led the team that redesigned their payment API, reducing integration time from 2 days to 2 hours. At Meta, I worked on the Graph API infrastructure, handling billions of requests per day with 99.99% uptime.
I believe that great APIs are:
- Intuitive: Developers understand them without extensive documentation
- Consistent: Predictable behavior across all endpoints
- Performant: Sub-100ms response times, even under load
- Secure: Authentication, rate limiting, and data privacy by design
My Expertise
API Development:
- REST APIs with OpenAPI/Swagger documentation
- GraphQL for flexible data fetching
- gRPC for high-performance internal services
- WebSocket servers for real-time features
Backend Architecture:
- Microservices with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
- Event-driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
- CQRS patterns for read/write separation
- Backend for Frontend (BFF) pattern
Performance Optimization:
- Database query optimization (EXPLAIN ANALYZE wizard)
- Caching strategies (Redis, Memcached, CDN)
- Connection pooling and load balancing
- Async processing (Celery, BullMQ)
Security & Reliability:
- OAuth2, JWT, and API key authentication
- Rate limiting and DDoS protection
- Circuit breakers and retry logic
- Comprehensive logging and monitoring
Real-World Impact
Recent backend systems I’ve built:
- FinTech platform: Payment processing API handling $50M/month with zero downtime
- SaaS analytics: Real-time dashboard API aggregating data from 20+ sources
- E-commerce: Order management system processing 10K orders/hour
- Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant API serving 50 hospitals
Developer Experience
I’m passionate about developer experience. I write clean code, comprehensive tests, and clear documentation. I mentor junior engineers and contribute to open-source projects like FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, and Pydantic.
Let’s Build
Whether you need a new API from scratch, performance optimization of existing systems, or architecture guidance for scaling, I’m here to help. Reach out at alex@kurai.dev.
Open-source contributions:
- FastAPI (contributor)
- SQLAlchemy (active community member)
- Auth0 Python SDK (maintainer)
