Scope: Application Architect, AI API Integration, and SRE Leadership
Situation:
Yclas is a white-label classifieds SaaS platform serving global customers with customizable, self-hosted or cloud-hosted marketplace solutions. I was brought in during a period of accelerated feature development and infrastructure evolution, with the goal of expanding platform capabilities, modernizing architecture, and improving stability.
Task:
My primary objectives were to:
- Propose and Architect and implement AI-powered features to enhance platform value
- Lead a small development team to deliver scoped features across frontend, backend, and DevOps
- Improve infrastructure reliability and observability through SRE-focused initiatives
- Identify and remediate architectural inefficiencies and technical debt
Action:
- AI API Integration: Designed and implemented a new modular AI pipeline that leveraged third-party APIs (e.g., OpenAI) to assist users in listing generation and content moderation.
- Architected secure API routing and fallback logic
- Ensured compliance with usage rate limits and error handling best practices
- Developed configurable admin settings for customers to enable/disable AI features
- Team Leadership:
- Led a small, remote team with developers/stakeholders.
- Wrote detailed implementation specs and reviewed pull requests for backend (PHP) and frontend (jQuery)
- Coordinated weekly standups and sprint retrospectives
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE):
- Hardened MYSQL database configurations for performance and availability.
- Coordinated feature deployment workflows to reduce downtime achieving all sprint milestones.
- Set up custom application logging and health checks for proactive monitoring
- Assisted in debugging critical performance issues caused by ORM query misuse and unbounded parameterization.
Result:
- Successfully delivered AI-assisted listing features to production—boosting user engagement and positive customer feedback
- Reduced incident response times and deployment-related downtime through improved observability and CI/CD hygiene
- Helped modernize Yclas’s technical architecture and workflows, enabling smoother scaling for both self-hosted and managed instances
- Strengthened team velocity and cross-discipline collaboration between backend, frontend, and ops contributors
This engagement highlights my ability to blend application architecture, AI integration, technical leadership, and SRE discipline—all while working across a fast-moving SaaS platform with real users and uptime expectations.