Reliable systems, thoughtfully built.

I'm Joseph, a senior backend engineer with 7+ years designing secure, reliable web and cloud systems.

Soli Deo gloria

I specialize in PHP and Laravel, system design, distributed architectures, and backend fundamentals, with hands-on experience in Go, Python, and production AI systems. I am saved by grace through faith.

Recent Work

Current engagement

I architected a modular Laravel AI platform that automates copywriting and an 11-stage email workflow across five business systems. The platform combines Anthropic-backed orchestrator and specialist agents, persistent multimodal conversations, structured outputs, prompt caching, cost telemetry, and deterministic fallbacks. I also designed its ClickStack/HyperDX observability platform on autoscaling Kubernetes, covering logs, metrics, traces, session replay, alerts, backups, SSO, and recovery.

The delivery pipeline enforces code style, maximum-level PHPStan/Larastan analysis, TypeScript and security checks, and more than 1,500 Pest tests across five layers, with sharded browser tests and atomic releases.

Teamworks

I delivered a GM budget management product from the ground up in three months, with more than 90% test coverage and daily production deployments. I also helped deliver integrated athlete payment systems in eight months, ahead of the NCAA’s July 2025 regulatory deadline, using Domain-Driven Design and CQRS to keep the financial and regulatory logic maintainable. The supporting API achieved sub-second response times through query optimization and asynchronous processing.

Earlier work

At Prodege, I reduced Google Ads campaign launch time from eight hours to 30 minutes, helped prevent $20K–$30K in monthly wasted spend, and optimized queries on 200GB+ MySQL tables from 45 seconds to under three seconds. At Clockwork, I built products serving 50K+ users, improved response times by 60% on a site handling 100K+ daily requests, and maintained a promotion engine serving 350K+ accounts with 99.9% uptime.

Dev Philosophy

I value proven, well-tested tools with strong communities and reliable stability. I evaluate technology by the problems it solves, not its novelty. Fundamentals matter more than language: clear architecture, comprehensive testing, observability, and maintainable code transfer across ecosystems.

My production work spans REST APIs, MySQL, Redis, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, distributed tracing, enterprise SSO, and CI/CD. I use DDD, CQRS, microservices, TDD, load testing, and static analysis where they make the system easier to reason about and operate.

I have worked remotely since 2019. Thoughtful documentation, comprehensive PR reviews, clear asynchronous communication, and practical guidance for other engineers are part of how I deliver software, not separate activities.

I also use Claude Code and OpenCode with repository context, specialized skills, MCP integrations, and automated guardrails to accelerate development without lowering review or quality standards.

Education

I earned an M.Sc. in Data Science with a 4.00 GPA and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh.

Testimonials

“Today is Joseph’s two-year anniversary with Clockwork. In that time, I’ve seen him excel as a software engineer. He’s demonstrated a depth of expertise in LAMP stack web application development, content management systems (Craft, Drupal, WordPress), and building out a series of job portals on PageUp.

He’s also shown a breadth of expertise by inspiring his team as a scrum master, teaching machine learning to other engineers, and most recently, leading a migration from Salesforce Pardot to HubSpot. Joseph sets an outstanding example for his peers and it’s not a surprise why they love working with him. Thank you Joseph for all your contributions these past two years!”

- Vince Cabansag (2021), COO @ Clockwork

Let’s Connect

For backend engineering, system architecture, or AI platform work, review my resume , browse my projects , or reach out via email .

Writing

All posts

Indexing Tough Fields in MySQL

Intro When working with a database, you’re often working with a lot of data, and it’s likely necessary to search through that data quickly. One excellent option to help …

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A Match Made in PHP

PHP is often criticized for being a bad language. Developers often point to the inconsistent function names inconsistent parameter order a history of insecure mysql functions there …

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The Dots Find Their Way

It started with boredom as all good things do I was at the end of the summer semester while getting my Masters in Data Science and I was bored and needed a hobby project. …

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My Christian Testimony

I was really fortunate to grow up in a Christian home where we went to church almost every weekend. Weeknights in childhood would be filled with church-related activities like …

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