Open to opportunities

John Torgerson

@johntorgerson

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Senior software engineer specializing in Python backend and production AI systems.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek backend or platform roles where I can build production AI systems, improve observability, and ship scalable, secure SaaS features in collaborative teams.

I am a senior software engineer with 12+ years building Python-based SaaS products and cloud-hosted backend systems, recently focused on putting LLMs into production at EliseAI. I design and deliver scalable APIs, data pipelines, and distributed services that power customer-facing AI features.

My recent work includes implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Azure OpenAI, vector embeddings, and pgvector, improving end-to-end response latency by ~30%, and building event-driven pipelines using Celery, Redis, and Kafka. I have led API design, schema migrations, observability, and deployment using Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitHub Actions.

I collaborate closely with product, ML, and customer success teams to translate customer needs into shipped features, mentor engineers, and take prototypes to production while maintaining multi-tenant security, compliance, and reliable operational practices.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

EliseAI

Jul 2022 - Present (3 years 6 months)

Owned and built backend systems for an LLM-powered conversational AI platform, implementing RAG with vector embeddings and pgvector to enable accurate AI responses and improving end-to-end response latency by ~30%.

Python fastAPI PostgreSQL Celery Kafka Pgvector Azure OpenAI Docker Kubernetes

Senior Software Engineer

Plaid

Jan 2019 - Jun 2022 (3 years 5 months)

Built Python APIs and PostgreSQL data models supporting financial data flows for millions of users, reduced DB load ~40% via query tuning and caching, and designed Kafka pipelines processing tens of millions of events per day.

Python PostgreSQL Redis Kafka REST Distributed Systems Monitoring SQL Performance Tuning

Software Engineer

ThoughtWorks

May 2016 - Dec 2018 (2 years 7 months)

Built Python backend services and relational data models for healthcare and financial SaaS, implemented RBAC and audit logging for compliance, and introduced Dockerized environments and Terraform to improve delivery consistency.

Python Docker Terraform Angular SQL RBAC & Compliance Backend Development

Software Engineer

Microsoft

Jun 2014 - Apr 2016 (1 year 10 months)

Built Azure-hosted backend services and event ingestion pipelines processing 15M+ events per day, improving request success rates and tail latency through performance tuning and refactoring.