Backend Systems Consultant
Backend systems built to scale.
I'm Miguel Pinto — 20 years of system architecture, cloud-native infrastructure, and backend development.
What I do
Specialized backend consulting for companies that can't afford to get it wrong.
Backend Systems Development
I design and build production-grade backend systems using Typescript, Golang, and Python. From API architecture and microservices to database optimization and data pipelines.
Learn more →Cloud Infrastructure & DevOps
Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and cloud migrations. I've deployed systems on VMware vSphere for organizations managing national-scale infrastructure.
Learn more →Technical Consulting
Architecture reviews, technology selection, hands-on pair programming, and team augmentation. I embed with your team and transfer knowledge so you're stronger after I leave.
Learn more →Track record
Years in technology
Engineers recruited at Rocket Internet
Professional recommendations
Managing Director and CTO of the Porto Development Centre. Recruited 130+ staff in four months.
Led Kubernetes cluster deployment on VMware vSphere for the organization managing Sweden's .se TLD.
What they say
"Miguel blew us all away with his deep understanding of Kubernetes, platform engineering, SRE, and container orchestration. His proposals presented clearly the pros, cons, and trade-offs of the technologies. I don't think we could have asked for a better teammate and tech advisor."
"Miguel is one of those teammates you will never forget about. From the professional aptitude to being a master of your technical stack."
Latest writing
Architecting AI Applications for Production
A threat-model-first walkthrough of shipping LLM-backed features — prompt injection defenses, multi-provider failover, structured output, cost control, and the concurrency traps that melt AI services in production.
Zero Trust Security for Microservices
Service-mesh zero trust, in practice: SPIFFE identities, mTLS by default, Istio and Linkerd policy at the sidecar, network policies underneath, and the places where you still need app-level authorization.
Real-Time Data Pipelines with TypeScript and Kafka
How I build type-safe, event-driven data pipelines using TypeScript and KafkaJS -- from schema validation to dead letter queues to exactly-once processing.
Optimizing Go for High-Throughput Systems
Memory management, concurrency patterns, and profiling techniques that took my Go services from adequate to high-performance. Practical optimization, not premature optimization.
Resilient Microservices in Go
Circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries, timeouts, and degradation — the fault-tolerance patterns that keep distributed Go systems alive when dependencies fail.
Authentication Patterns for Distributed Systems
A threat-model-first walkthrough of JWT, OAuth2/OIDC, refresh rotation, and zero trust auth for Go services — with the mistakes that actually burn people in production.
Let's talk about what you're building.
I take on a limited number of engagements at a time. If you have a backend challenge that needs senior-level attention, I'd like to hear about it.