Systems that move
100M+ events a day
without falling over.
I'm Steve Danovich — a staff-level backend and platform engineer. I design and build the Kafka pipelines, AWS infrastructure, and Java services that high-throughput, regulated businesses depend on. Two decades doing it for banks, payment networks, and media platforms.
I take the parts of your backend that keep people up at night.
Most teams don't need another generalist. They need someone who has already debugged the 2am incident, migrated the thing everyone was scared to touch, and built the dashboard that catches it next time.
Event pipelines
Kafka and Confluent Cloud architectures built to scale and survive: producers, stream processing, exactly-once patterns, sink connectors.
Platform & infra
AWS on ECS/EKS/Lambda with Terraform. Repeatable, version-controlled infrastructure instead of console clicks no one can reproduce.
Observability & rescue
Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry from scratch — plus incident RCA on the failures you can't reproduce on your own.
Have a system that needs building or rescuing?
Tell me what you're dealing with. I'll reply within one business day with whether it's a fit and how I'd approach it.