BACKEND ENGINEER · BASED IN TORONTO

Backend systems,
built to last.

Reliable, high-throughput infrastructure at Shopify. Co-founder of Coraki.

Get in touch → See recent work

RECENT WORK

scalable Rails & GraphQL backends at Shopify event-driven systems on Kafka Coraki — applied AI for funded startups
01 About

Engineer. Co-founder. Long-term thinker.

I'm a backend engineer at Shopify, where I build the systems that handle millions of daily requests — durable APIs, event-driven pipelines, and the boring infrastructure that keeps merchants online.

Alongside that, I co-founded Coraki, a small consultancy helping funded startups ship production AI that actually lasts past the demo.

I care about systems that don't rot — code that's easy to operate, hand off, and outlive the team that wrote it.

02 Work

Where I've built things.

  • 2020 — Present

    Shopify

    Senior backend engineer. Scalable Ruby/Rails services, GraphQL APIs, Kafka-based event systems, and the platform work behind millions of merchants.

  • 2023 — Present

    Coraki — Co-founder

    Applied AI engineering for funded startups and enterprises. From multi-tenant auth to low-latency voice — production AI, shipped not staged.

  • 2018 — 2019

    QHacks · Queen's DSC

    Director of Technology for QHacks and Developer Student Club lead at Queen's University.

  • 2018

    Centre for Advanced Computing

    Research intern. High-performance computing infrastructure and tooling.

03 Projects

Things I'm building.

Coraki

Applied AI

Engineering studio shipping production AI for funded startups — auth, voice, infra, and the unglamorous middle layer.

coraki.dev ↗

invest-manage

Portfolio

Personal portfolio terminal that ingests Wealthsimple CSVs and turns them into a clean, queryable view of holdings and performance.

private

investment-plays

Options

Unusual-Whales-style options flow scanner, journal, and pattern researcher. Watches the tape so I don't have to.

private

folio

Postgres · Clerk

Multi-user portfolio tracker built on Postgres and Clerk. The grown-up cousin of invest-manage.

in development

tickerroom

Markets

Lightweight market-data workspace for thinking out loud about tickers.

in development

Earlier work

Archive

MusiCrowd — Spotify-DJ crowdsourcing. Pair Code — real-time collaborative editor. Slack clone — team collab from scratch.

github ↗
04 Writing

Notes from the work.

Occasional posts on backend systems, applied AI, and the tradeoffs you only notice in production.

Read on Medium ↗

05 Contact

Let's talk.

Best for: backend / infra work, applied AI projects through Coraki, or anything that needs to last longer than a quarter.

akin@coraki.dev →