andy@dev:~$ whoami

Andy Blair

Backend Engineer

andy@dev:~/about$ cat README.md

Backend engineer with ~8 years of experience building scalable, high-throughput systems. Primarily working in Go and Python across cloud security, distributed platforms, real-time event systems, and search infrastructure.

I focus on solving hard problems at the systems level — whether that’s processing hundreds of millions of events per month, halving search times on billion-document clusters, or building SDKs that make complex platforms accessible.

andy@dev:~/experience$ cat achievements.log

Backend Security Engineering

2025 - Present
  • Rebuilt key backend components to handle compute-intensive security scanning workloads
  • Engineered multi-cloud support across 4 major cloud providers
  • Reduced cost and compute overhead by rewriting the core scan engine for improved efficiency

Platform & SDK Engineering

2023 - 2025
  • Created public SDK for a data marketplace platform, enabling third-party integrations
  • Built several AI applications on top of the platform, including RAG over structured and unstructured data
  • Refactored core Redis integration layer to improve performance and maintainability
  • Extended and maintained a distributed platform of Go and Python services communicating via libp2p, Redis, and gRPC

Real-Time Systems Engineering

2020 - 2023
  • Owned real-time event system handling 300M+ events/month across in-app notifications and WebSockets
  • Rewrote legacy real-time system to handle scale, implementing horizontal scaling
  • Reduced service memory footprint by ~40% through architecture improvements
  • Debugged and recovered from production outages in Kubernetes environments
  • Implemented CI/CD automated testing pipelines with GitHub Actions

Search & Backend Engineering

2017 - 2020
  • Led implementation of a real-time chat feature, building WebSocket proxy gateway for external users
  • Halved search response times on an Elasticsearch cluster indexing ~1 billion documents
  • Built and shipped features across backend services and AngularJS frontend

andy@dev:~/projects$ ls -la

coreapi

boilerplate for API services written in Golang using echo as a router.

Go

ragstack-desktop

1

Desktop RAG application for querying local documents

CSS

Crypto

Why not build a coin in golang?

Go

uk_gov_petition_cli

3

CLI tool for browsing UK government petitions

Python

ask

1

A quick and easy way to query LLMs from your command line

Go

grpc-example

Example gRPC service implementation in Go

Go

WIDY

What I did yesterday is a tool to summarise git contributions for the previous day.

Go

andy@dev:~/skills$ cat stack.txt

Languages

Go Python SQL JavaScript C++

Infrastructure

Kubernetes Docker Linux CI/CD GitHub Actions AWS GCP Azure

Data & Messaging

Redis Elasticsearch RabbitMQ PostgreSQL

Protocols & APIs

gRPC REST WebSockets libp2p

Domains

Cloud Security Distributed Systems Real-Time Event Systems Search Infrastructure AI/RAG Applications

andy@dev:~/education$ cat degree.txt

BSc Computer Science

2013 - 2017

Queen's University Belfast

Graduated with 1st Class Honours. Final year project: processing pipeline for financial transactions in C++.