About
Backend engineer building reliable Rails systems, high-volume APIs, and AI-powered products.
I'm Danial Asghar, a senior backend engineer focused on Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, background processing, high-volume APIs, and AI-powered workflows. I partner with founders to take production SaaS systems from first commit to scale.
Most of my work lives where a system has to stay correct under failure — a job that runs at least once, a webhook delivered twice, an LLM call that is slow, metered, and non-deterministic. What I care about is the boundary between "it works on my machine" and "it holds under load," and I write about the decisions on that boundary in theblog and by topic. The writing is backed by open-source systems I build and ship, so the ideas come with the code that runs them.
- Ruby on Rails
- PostgreSQL
- Background Processing
- Distributed Systems
- AI Backends
Skills
Backend
- Ruby on Rails
- Ruby
- PostgreSQL
- REST & GraphQL APIs
- Service design
Async & Distributed
- Sidekiq
- Solid Queue
- Redis
- Background jobs
- Idempotency & retries
AI Integration
- OpenAI API
- OpenRouter
- Structured Outputs
- Async LLM pipelines
Platform & Infra
- AWS
- Docker
- Cloudflare
- CI/CD
- Shopify APIs
Experience
Senior Backend Engineer
2022 — PresentFreelance / Contract
- Design and ship production Rails backends for founders and funded startups — API design, background-processing pipelines, and AI integrations.
- Move slow or failure-prone work (webhooks, LLM calls, third-party syncs) off the request path into idempotent background jobs.
Backend Engineer
2020 — 2022SaaS Product Company
- Built multi-tenant billing, teams, and the shared API layer on a Rails SaaS platform.
- Owned data modeling and the background-processing behind web and mobile clients.
Backend Engineer
2018 — 2020Early-Stage Startup
- Designed PostgreSQL data models and background pipelines running on AWS.
- Set up automated CI/CD and repeatable deployments for the team.