Ali Rafiei
Melbourne,VIC
Summary
Backend Engineer with a focus on performance engineering and system reliability. Expert in tuning multi-engine database environments and building comprehensive observability frameworks to ensure 24/7 system health. A strong advocate for clean architecture, with a demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and accelerate the software development lifecycle through innovative tooling.
Overview
3
3
years of professional experience
Work History
Backend Chapter Lead
Idekavan Group
Melbourne, VIC (Remote)
11.2025 - Current
- Facilitated recurring knowledge-sharing sessions and documented standardized backend development workflows to ensure architectural consistency across all product squads.
- Designed structured internship roadmaps and guided junior engineers to cultivate a culture of continuous learning and growth.
- Directed recruitment efforts for backend engineering roles to strengthen engineering team capabilities.
- Directed the development of custom AI agents to automate internal code review processes, achieving a 30% reduction in manual review time.
- Collaborated with engineers to overhaul CI/CD pipelines, specifically optimizing backend test suites to increase deployment velocity and reliability.
- Improved system observability by building Grafana dashboards and writing clear documentation for our production databases technical and design debts. (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch),
- Acted as technical liaison for Product Owners, translating complex business requirements into scalable service designs and long-term product roadmaps.
- Managed the strategic partnership with cloud provider (Hamravesh); identified critical billing discrepancies through deep-dive technical audits, successfully negotiating a retroactive refund and a 5% reduction in ongoing operational costs.
Software Engineer (Backend)
Idekavan Group
Tehran, Iran
07.2023 - 11.2025
- Developed and maintained scalable web applications using Python frameworks (Django, FastAPI) and RESTful APIs.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to design software solutions that enhance user experience.
- Utilized Django Silk and PGHero to profile and refactor high-latency endpoints, successfully reducing P99 response times from 32s to 2s and optimizing database queries from 5s to sub-20ms.
- Optimized multi-database architectures (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse) by implementing advanced indexing strategies (GIN, GiST, B-tree) and ESR rules; successfully reduced a 30-minute Celery job to 3 minutes and significantly improved query throughput.
- Resolved critical production bottlenecks in Elasticsearch by refactoring dynamic script queries; this intervention eliminated 400-series errors and directly contributed to a 10% increase in revenue.
- Integrated OpenTelemetry with Gunicorn (Django) and Uvicorn (FastAPI) services to establish full-stack tracing, enabling rapid identification and resolution of microservice bottlenecks.
- Diagnosed and patched a memory-intensive bug in the Celery Beat scheduler; successfully contributed the fix back to the open-source library, resolving critical server throttling issues.
- Led the modernization of legacy Python codebases, prioritizing code clarity and maintainability while ensuring zero downtime during performance optimizations.
- Spearheaded the integration of critical third-party services, focusing on robust error-handling and seamless data synchronization.
- Authored comprehensive API documentation using Swagger to streamline internal development and facilitate third-party adoption.
- Engineered comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems using Prometheus and Grafana for custom backend metrics, integrated with Grafana Loki for centralized logging to accelerate root-cause analysis and system debugging.
Software Engineering Intern
Idekavan Group
Tehran, Iran
04.2023 - 07.2023
- Successfully transitioned to a full-time role after mastering SOLID principles and Design Patterns, applying them to refactor and modularize core Python services.
Education
Mechanical Engineering
University of Tehran
Tehran, Iran09-2020
Skills
- Team management
- Coaching and mentoring
- Problem-solving
- Python
- Object-oriented programming
- Django framework
- Open source contributions
- Performance optimization
- RESTful API design
- NoSQL databases experience
- SQL proficiency
- Agentic AI experience
Accomplishments
- Author of “From Challenges to Contributions: Optimizing Celery Beat for High Loads,” published in Towards Dev in 2025.
Timeline
Backend Chapter Lead
Idekavan Group
11.2025 - Current
Software Engineer (Backend)
Idekavan Group
07.2023 - 11.2025
Software Engineering Intern
Idekavan Group
04.2023 - 07.2023
Mechanical Engineering
University of Tehran