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Consulting / Contract One-Pager  ·  Full career CV: lxqu.dev/cv

Alex Kulikov

Senior Backend / Platform Engineer for AI & Data Infrastructure

Ex-Meta  ·  Founding engineer experience  ·  Context / Retrieval / Agents  ·  Cloud / Terraform / Reliability

Positioning

I'm strongest when a prototype works
but the underlying system is becoming hard to extend, debug, operate, or explain.

I help early-stage AI/data teams build and harden the backend infrastructure their products run on — data pipelines, context and retrieval systems, agent backends, and the cloud infrastructure underneath them.

Recent work includes: user-data ETL, GDPR data exports, embeddings, agent backends, AWS/GCP, Terraform, observability, audit-ready infrastructure.

What I Solve

  • AI prototype works, but backend/data/cloud architecture is fragile.
  • Data ingestion is messy, brittle, or hard to extend.
  • Context, retrieval, embeddings, or agents need production-grade foundations.
  • Cloud infrastructure grew organically and now lacks reproducibility or visibility.
  • A founder/CTO needs senior backend/platform ownership before hiring full-time.

Selected Experience

onFabric | Founding Engineer

August 2025 – April 2026  ·  onfabric.io

  • Reworked Meta data ingestion into a FastAPI/ECS pipeline with idempotent GCS-backed staged processing, ZIP batching and BDD coverage.
  • Owned multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS/GCP in Terraform: ECS, RDS, GCS, Vertex AI, Cloud Run, CloudWatch and IAM/OIDC.

case study: context-use | AI memory from GDPR data exports.

context-use.com  ·  GitHub repo

  • Built a provider-based ETL layer that normalises GDPR data exports from any platform into structured personal context for LLMs and agents — deployed to onFabric infrastructure, processing real user data at scale.
  • Designed for extensibility: new providers added via single-prompt codegen against a durable schema; shipped with 7 data providers (Airbnb, ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Instagram, Netflix, Telegram).

Lerno | Senior Software Engineer, Contract / Part-time

May 2025 – December 2025  ·  lerno.ai

  • Built and shipped a streaming LangGraph agent over meeting transcripts.
  • Owned the engineering SOC 2 readiness stream, including migration of AWS infrastructure to Terraform, infrastructure reproducibility, and documentation.

Meta | Senior Software Engineer

February 2020 – August 2024  ·  London, UK

  • Led a 6-person reliability workstream on the Data Transfer Project.
  • Achieved a 10x drop in DTP failure rate and overhauled the monitoring pipeline.
  • Prepared the DTP infrastructure for compliance with EU Digital Markets Act.

Sysblok | Head of Engineering

Since November 2023  ·  LinkedIn page  ·  sysblok.ru

  • Leading engineering for a nonprofit media project with 170k subscribers; team of 5, backlog, internal tooling and AI workflow automation.

Talks

May 2026 Claude Code Central London March 2026 AI Tinkerers London
"My 3-day-old OpenClaw knew more about me than most people do — from my 3-year choir streak to my recent Terraform headaches."

How I Help

Architecture Audit

1–2 weeks

Backend / data / cloud review, risk map, prioritized roadmap.

Hardening Sprint

2–6 weeks

Observability, reliability, deployment cleanup, maintainability, developer experience.

Data / Context Pipeline

Scoped per engagement

ETL, enrichment, embeddings, search APIs.

Cloud / Terraform

Scoped per engagement

Infrastructure cleanup, IaC, documentation.

Technical Strengths

Backend / Platform

Python · FastAPI · Node.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Redis · REST/GraphQL

AI / Data Infrastructure

ETL · embeddings · semantic search · retrieval · agent backends · Gemini API

Cloud / Infrastructure

AWS · GCP · Terraform · ECS · RDS · GCS · Vertex AI · Cloud Run · Docker · CI/CD

Reliability

Observability · monitoring · idempotency · production debugging

Credibility

  • Ex-Meta Senior Software Engineer
  • 10x failure-rate reduction, Meta DTP
  • Founding engineer, AI/data infrastructure
  • 100+ technical interviews conducted, Meta
  • Tech Nation UK Global Talent
  • BSc Computer Science, Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology

Availability

Available for focused audits, hardening sprints, fractional senior engineering and high-priority backend / cloud reliability work.

Best first step: email a short description of the system, deadline and current pain point.
Day rate available on request.

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