Role

Backend & systems engineer

Gholibjon Saidov

I keep backends running inside other people's constraints.

Availability: Open to a conversation

6

years in backend

3

systems in production

99.95

uptime over 12 months

Local time

Dushanbe, Tajikistan · UTC+5

About

An engineer who reads someone else's production before offering to rewrite it

Portrait: Gholibjon Saidov

Six years of server-side work in places where the stack is not a choice: shared hosting at a regulator, customs registries without documentation, NGOs with no infrastructure budget.

I work with what is already in production rather than what I would rather deploy. Architecture, to me, is the list of constraints you agreed not to route around.

Mostly Go and PHP on the server, PostgreSQL and MySQL for data, Prometheus for observability. I work in Tajik, Russian and English.

What I bring

  • I add observability

    I come into systems that have logs but no metrics, and make incidents readable from a dashboard rather than from whoever was on call.

  • I work inside given limits

    Shared hosting, no new services allowed, an undocumented registry — I design for the constraint instead of routing around it.

  • I hold the contract

    I reduce mismatched sources to a single response and keep it from going stale when those sources change without warning.

  • I write down what failed

    Every case study has a "what I would do differently" section. Not modesty — a way of not repeating myself.

Stack

What I work with, and how deeply

Level is not self-assessment but fact: where the code reached production, where it stayed in day-to-day work, and where I only read and patch what others wrote.

Languages

  • In productionUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Bank product comparison APIClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Bank product comparison API · Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below

Backend

  • In productionUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Bank product comparison API · Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below

Data

  • In productionUsed in: Customs code classification · Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Bank product comparison APIClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below

Infrastructure

  • In productionUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Customs code classification · Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below

Frontend

  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeNot in any published case yetClick to filter the work below
  • FamiliarUsed in: Donation platform for verified NGOsClick to filter the work below

Tools

  • In productionNot in any published case yetClick to filter the work below
  • In productionUsed in: Bank product comparison API · Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below
  • Working knowledgeUsed in: Customs code classificationClick to filter the work below

Work

Systems I was responsible for

nbt-compare-api2023

Financial regulator

Bank product comparison API

A public API that folds deposit terms from every bank in the country into a single response. The constraint came from the client: shared hosting, PHP 7.4 with no framework, no composer, and no cron more often than every fifteen minutes.

p95 of 82 ms on shared hosting

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • SQL
  • REST / OpenAPI
  • Linux
tnved-classifierUnder NDA

Customs clearance

Customs code classification

A Go service that parses goods declarations and matches them against the customs registry. A thirty-two goroutine worker pool, a circuit breaker in front of the external registry, metrics in Prometheus.

1,400 declarations per minute

  • Go
  • net/http
  • gRPC
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • SQL
ehson-platform2025

Non-profit sector

Donation platform for verified NGOs

Fundraising for verified non-profits: recipient vetting, payment intake, public reporting on every campaign. No infrastructure budget — the whole thing runs on a single server.

Beta: 11 organisations onboarded

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Flutter
  • PostgreSQL
  • REST / OpenAPI
  • Docker

Experience

Where it happened

  1. Mar 2025 — now

    Ehson

    Backend lead

    • Built the NGO donation platform from nothing to beta
    • Introduced public per-campaign reporting that reconciles to the last coin
    • Run two engineers and all of production on one server, no cloud budget
  2. Jan 2024 — Feb 2025

    Customs operator

    Backend engineer

    • Wrote the Go customs-code classifier: 1,400 declarations per minute
    • Wrapped the flaky external registry in a circuit breaker — degradations stopped reaching clients
    • Introduced Prometheus and Grafana where there had been no observability at all
  3. Jan 2023 — Dec 2023

    National Bank of Tajikistan

    Backend engineer (contract)

    • Designed and shipped the public deposit-comparison API in eleven weeks
    • Held p95 at 82 ms on shared hosting running framework-less PHP 7.4
    • Reduced fourteen different bank export formats to a single contract
  4. Apr 2021 — Dec 2022

    Fintech integrator

    Server-side developer

    • First Go in production: queues, retries, idempotent payment operations
    • Moved bank integrations from nightly batch exports to events
  5. Sep 2019 — Mar 2021

    Web studio

    PHP developer

    • First integrations with bank gateways and payment providers
    • Learned to read someone else’s production before proposing to rewrite it

Lab

Small things built for myself

No client here and no SLA. Every demo runs right on the page.

Contact

Write to me if you have a system that is not allowed to fall over

I reply within a day. Telegram is fastest.

Message on Telegram

Email

gh.5aidov@icloud.com

Or use the form

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