Max Yastremskyi

Senior Backend Engineer and Tech Lead with 6+ years shipping production Laravel platforms for CRM, e-commerce, manufacturing and premium-services businesses. I own complex domains end to end — order lifecycles, multi-station production workflows, payments, clearing and accounting — and design microservice back-ends on PHP 8.4 and Laravel 12, integrating payment, messaging, calendar and logistics providers with sandbox-verified reliability. I also build and lead AI-assisted engineering: I authored Groundwork, and I ship applied-AI features to production with a strict bias toward tests, grounding and verified integrations.

• Authored and open-sourced Groundwork (MIT) — an AI spec-driven development platform for Claude Code: risk-based task classification, five specialised review agents, automated gates and a companion-plugin ecosystem. Adopted across seven production codebases; roughly one task in three is stopped before code as mis-scoped.
• Shipped applied AI to production: voice intake behind schema-constrained, temperature-zero extraction, an intent gateway that validates model output instead of executing it, OCR and computer-vision pipelines — with provider fallback, prompt-injection defence and response-regression tests.
• Engineered payment and financial subsystems: card tokenization (tokens only), hierarchical payment requests, idempotency-keyed clearing, multi-currency decimal money with bcmath, accounting and tax export, signed-webhook reconciliation and all-or-nothing document issuance.
• Built a reusable multi-market headless commerce platform: storefront JSON API plus back-office admin, a retail and wholesale pricing engine, driver-abstracted payments and delivery, and an ERP catalogue sync.
• Delivered order-lifecycle and production-workflow platforms: multi-station scan tracking, quality control, weighted auto-assignment, server-side RBAC and right-to-left document rendering.

1. Apr 2024 — Present

   Senior Backend Engineer · Tech Lead

   RaDevs

   • Authored and open-sourced Groundwork, and set the team’s engineering standards and Definition of Done around it.
   • Built a reusable multi-market headless commerce platform: storefront JSON API, back-office admin, retail and wholesale pricing engine, driver-abstracted payments and delivery.
   • Shipped applied AI to production — an intent gateway that validates model output instead of executing it, voice intake behind schema-constrained extraction, OCR and computer-vision pipelines.
   • Engineered the payment and financial subsystems: card tokenization, idempotency-keyed clearing, decimal money with bcmath, accounting and tax export, signed-webhook reconciliation.
   • Architected order-lifecycle and production-workflow systems with multi-station scan tracking, quality control, weighted auto-assignment and centralised state-transition guards.
   • Mentored engineers through review agents and architecture decisions.
2. Aug 2022 — Apr 2024

   Full-Stack PHP Engineer

   TerraForce Software

   • Built and maintained e-commerce backends with subscription payments, local checkout and delivery, multi-language storefronts and response-query caching.
   • Developed admin panels with custom tools, cards, fields and dashboards, including a leads-management CRM with rich-text editing and invoice generation.
   • Built API-first mobile app backends: JWT auth, push notifications, QR codes, two-factor auth, and PDF/Word/Excel document generation.
   • Delivered search-driven features — full-text search, geo-targeting, SMS and messenger notifications, real-time sockets, social login.
   • Integrated an early LLM alongside Google APIs and web-scraping pipelines for content generation.
3. Jun 2020 — Aug 2022

   PHP Engineer

   Imrev

   • Built e-commerce and corporate platforms end to end — custom modules, admin panels and storefronts — across concurrent client projects.
   • Integrated payment, shipping and analytics providers, replacing manual client workflows with automated order flows.
   • Optimised page, catalogue and search performance through query tuning, indexing and caching, and owned post-production incident handling.
4. Jan 2020 — Jun 2020

   Junior Engineer (C++ / .NET)

   YUKS++

   • Maintained and extended legacy modules, contributed to a migration to WinForms, and resolved pre-release defects during QA and hardening cycles.