available for select consulting
Kev Gates —
backend & infrastructure engineer.
I build the parts of software that aren't supposed to be noticed: queues that don't lose messages, APIs that don't fall over, servers that stay boring.
About
I'm a backend engineer with a decade of experience shipping services that run quietly in production and rarely make the incident channel. Reliability, not novelty, is the thing I optimize for.
Most of my work lives in Go and Python, on top of Postgres, Redis, and whatever message queue the problem actually calls for. I care more about clear failure modes than clever abstractions.
Outside of client work, I maintain a couple of small open-source tools and spend an unreasonable amount of time tuning my homelab.
Selected work
Ledger reconciliation service
2024
Rebuilt a fintech client's nightly reconciliation job as an event-driven pipeline, cutting processing time from six hours to eleven minutes.
Internal API gateway
2022–2023
Designed and ran a lightweight gateway handling auth, rate limiting, and routing for a growing set of internal microservices.
Metrics pipeline for a logistics platform
2020–2021
Built the ingestion layer for a real-time fleet-tracking dashboard used by dispatch teams across three countries.
Now
- Consulting part-time for a couple of small teams on backend architecture.
- Slowly rewriting an old side project from Flask to Go, mostly out of stubbornness.
- Reading through Designing Data-Intensive Applications for the second time.
Contact
Best reached by email. I don't check anything else particularly often.