Full-Stack Engineer & Product Builder
Laravel · Livewire · Alpine.js · Typesense · Go · Vue

I'm a full-stack engineer and product-focused builder with experience designing and implementing scalable web platforms and backend systems. I focus on clean architecture, performance, and long-term maintainability, with a strong preference for solutions that are simple, explicit, and resilient.

My work spans complex application flows, real-time user interfaces, search and discovery systems, and trust-oriented platform features. I enjoy working close to the problem space—translating real-world requirements into well-structured, production-ready software.

I value thoughtful system design, clear domain boundaries, and developer experience, and I'm particularly interested in systems that balance usability, privacy, and technical correctness.

• Laravel (advanced architecture, queues, jobs, APIs)
• Livewire / Volt for reactive server-driven UIs
• Go for background services and system-level tooling
• MySQL / SQLite / JSON-based indexing pipelines

• Alpine.js for lightweight interactivity
• Tailwind CSS for scalable design systems
• Real-time UI patterns and progressive enhancement

• Typesense (custom indexing, facets, relevance tuning)
• Matching algorithms (psychological, lifestyle, preference-based)
• Structured data extraction and ranking logic

• Background workers and long-running services
• Windows services and tray-based applications
• Stripe Connect & escrow-style payment flows
• KYC, verification, and trust-based system design

• Intelligent Matching Systems
  Compatibility scoring using psychological traits, lifestyle data, and personal boundaries.

• Search & Discovery Platforms
  Custom indexing pipelines, faceted filtering, and relevance-aware search UIs.

• Marketplaces & Trust Systems
  Identity verification, escrow payments, liability handling, and reputation mechanisms.

• Product-Focused Engineering
  Systems built around real users, not just technical novelty.

I actively seek out problems that push beyond routine implementation—the kind that require actual thinking, not just pattern-matching from the last Stack Overflow answer.

This includes integrating AI tools and agents into real workflows: building systems that interact with LLMs, designing agentic pipelines, and figuring out where AI genuinely helps versus where it confidently hallucinates your schema into oblivion. I find the intersection of structured software engineering and AI tooling particularly interesting—especially when the goal is practical reliability, not demos.

I also do vibe coding on occasion. Not because I've abandoned my principles, but because sometimes the fastest way to validate an idea is to just let it run and see what breaks first. (Usually the schema. It's always the schema.)

Simple solutions scale better than clever ones.

I aim for pragmatic engineering: minimal complexity, explicit trade-offs, and systems that can evolve without rewrites.

• Search relevance engineering
• Privacy-aware user modeling
• High-trust platform design
• AI agent architecture and human-in-the-loop system design

• GitHub: https://github.com/amiralikh
• Website: https://knightify.tech

This profile represents ongoing work and experimentation. Not all projects are public.