Open to opportunities

Henrik Ali

@henrikali

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Senior AI/Backend Platform Engineer building scalable SaaS, event-driven systems, and LLM-powered RAG products.

Norway

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to lead backend platform and AI integrations—designing cloud-native, event-driven systems and LLM/RAG retrieval to improve reliability, performance, and developer velocity with strong cross-team collaboration.

I’m a Senior AI / Backend Platform Engineer with 10+ years of experience building scalable SaaS platforms, distributed backend systems, and AI-powered applications across FinTech, Healthcare, and SaaS. I focus on designing microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native infrastructure with Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS—recently centered on LLM integrations, RAG-based systems, and semantic retrieval platforms.

In my most recent role, I architected microservices for payment orchestration, built AWS SQS-based asynchronous transaction workflows, and delivered RAG-powered retrieval systems integrating LLM APIs and vector databases. Across platforms, I’ve improved reliability and developer productivity—cutting incident detection/debugging time by ~30%, reducing incident response time by ~30%, and improving backend processing performance by ~20% through query/workload optimization—while strengthening observability with Datadog, centralized logging, and alerting. I also mentor engineers on API design and backend architecture, and I collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and data teams to set platform standards and raise system performance.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Cino

Sep 2024 - Present (1 year 9 months)

Architected and built microservices for shared payments and transaction workflows using Python and FastAPI, including event-driven processing with AWS SQS. Implemented RAG-powered retrieval with LLM APIs and vector databases, and reduced incident detection/debugging time by ~30% through improved monitoring and alert accuracy.

Python fastAPI PostgreSQL Redis SQS Microservices Event Driven Datadog

Senior Software Engineer

Framer

May 2022 - Jul 2024 (2 years 2 months)

Built backend services for a SaaS platform enabling content management, publishing, and collaboration, including semantic search and recommendation services. Improved indexing/retrieval pipelines to enhance search quality and responsiveness, reduced incident response time by ~30%, and managed Kubernetes and Terraform-based infrastructure.

Python PostgreSQL Vector Search Kubernetes Terraform AWS GitHub Actions

Software Engineer

Oviva

Apr 2020 - May 2022 (2 years 1 month)

Developed secure backend systems for healthcare applications used by 250K+ users, supporting patient engagement and clinician workflows. Built data pipelines for analytics and monitoring, improved backend processing performance by ~20%, and implemented Prometheus/Grafana monitoring with GDPR-compliant handling of sensitive data.

Python Django fastAPI React PostgreSQL Redis Data Pipelines Grafana GDPR Compliance

Software Engineer

Unzer

Jul 2017 - Mar 2020 (2 years 8 months)

Developed payment processing and merchant integration systems handling ~500K+ transactions/day. Implemented event-driven processing with Kafka and Redis, improved observability (Datadog and ELK), reduced payment processing latency by ~15%, and contributed to PCI-DSS and SOC2 compliance initiatives.

Java Spring Boot C# .NET Core PostgreSQL Kafka Redis ELK Datadog PCI Compliance

Full Stack Engineer

Enento Group

Sep 2015 - Jul 2017 (1 year 10 months)

Built full-stack applications and customer data access APIs using REST and GraphQL for credit data, risk intelligence, and reporting workflows across the Nordics. Supported AWS migration and containerized deployments, and improved deployment efficiency by ~25% via CI/CD pipeline automation and testing improvements.

React GraphQL PostgreSQL REST APIs Docker AWS CI CD