Francisco Bautista

Francisco Bautista

Lead Backend Engineer

I build reliable backend systems — and the AI agents that run on them.

01. About

I’m a lead backend engineer based out of Chicago, living a nomad stretch from the Dominican Republic — my country of birth. For five years I’ve been at Gantri, a 3D manufacturing company that turns lighting designs into physical products on demand. I climbed Full Stack → Backend → Lead owning the paths where orders, stock, shipping, and billing have to be correct.

Off hours I don’t “tinker with AI.” I run a production multi-agent setup over Telegram — cron, approvals, failover after a real outage — under one rule I won’t bend: the deterministic engine owns every number; the LLM only narrates. Same instinct shows up at work: fail closed, isolate blast radius, leave the money path boring.

I’m bilingual (English / Spanish), founder of Digital Prodigy for small businesses getting online and paid, and I still review what ships before it hits a customer. If you want flashy demos, I’m probably not your person. If you want someone who treats edge cases like the product — let’s talk.

02. Experience

  1. Aug 2021 — Present

    Lead Backend Engineer · Gantri

    Full Stack Software Engineer → Backend Software Engineer → Lead Backend Engineer · Remote

    Top committer on the core backend. Own order, stock, partner, and billing architecture; set backend direction and unblock delivery across API and admin.

    • Wholesale trade-partner platform — Designed and own the module connecting Gantri order/stock to major retailers via SPS Commerce EDI and partner APIs (Haworth, West Elm, Lumens, Perigold, Wayfair, Fabric): PO ingestion, pricing, shipment status, and sync isolation so partner failures can’t silently corrupt stock or orders.
    • Gantri Made — B2B portal & billing — Led backend for orgs, contracts/MSA, portal orders, and factory Made ops. Shipped statements (multi-designer allocation, development fees) with idempotent Stripe invoicing, isolated cron failures, and PDF statement email — so Made billing runs as product, not manual finance ops.
    • Gantri You / customizable products — Rewrote product creation so lights use the full color/variant system instead of default-color-only SKUs — global variants, options, part templates, and publish flows. Unblocked customer-facing customization the old model could not express.
    • Order economics — Owned returns/refunds and shipping money paths: Complete Return, shipping refund ledger, versioned shipping policy (order-time snapshot, pro-rated refunds), and Stripe duplicate/over-refund guards so finance edge cases fail closed.
    • Channel integrations — Shopify partner import (credentials, conflict-safe cron, SKU/Barcode resolution, alerting). Square retail shop in flight: payment/refund webhooks, catalog sync, and reserved shop stock so register sales settle into Gantri inventory and orders.
    • TypeScript
    • Node.js
    • PostgreSQL
    • MongoDB
    • Stripe
    • Shopify
    • Square
    • SPS Commerce / EDI
    • Order Economics
    • Integrations
  2. 2023 — Present

    Founder & Engineer · Digital Prodigy MFB

    US-registered studio · EN / ES

    • Bilingual studio helping small businesses get online and paid — web presence, Google Business Profile, WhatsApp Business automation, and payment setup; personally reviewed before customer go-live.
    • Web Development
    • Google Business Profile
    • WhatsApp Automation
    • Payments
    • EN / ES
  3. Dec 2019 — Aug 2021

    Full Stack Software Engineer · Aligned Meetings

    Chicago, IL · Google Calendar–centric meetings product

    • Co-primary full-stack on the product: React/Redux app, Node/Express realtime layer (Socket.io, Redis, JWT; authored that server), PHP API (Fat-Free, MySQL), Chrome extension.
    • Google Calendar integration — scheduling/focus time, timezone-correct availability, push webhooks + catch-up sync; shareable meeting cards and external-attendee flows.
    • Chrome Web Store extension for coworker free/busy on Calendar (Gulp release automation); migrated Vultr → GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, NGINX, PM2) with SSL, multi-host routing, and cutover runbooks; hardened Google/JWT auth for non–Workspace users.
    • React
    • Redux
    • Node.js
    • Express
    • Socket.io
    • Redis
    • PHP
    • MySQL
    • GCP
    • Chrome Extensions
  4. May 2016 — Dec 2019

    Lead Front End Developer · Dream Town Realty

    Chicago, IL

    • Led front-end delivery; migrated company sites from legacy JSP/Struts to PHP/WordPress; automated site generation and dynamic reporting.
    • Front End Leadership
    • PHP
    • WordPress
    • Automation

Download resume (PDF)

03. Personal Project

  • THE SYSTEM

    A gamified life operating system — Solo Leveling × Atomic Habits. Real-world effort earns XP, levels five life domains (mind, power, forge, vitality, wealth), and raises a rank. It runs my day over Telegram, and it's built on one non-negotiable rule: the deterministic engine owns every number — the AI only narrates.

    • Python
    • FastAPI
    • pytest
    • React
    • Vite
    • Telegram Bot API
    • SQLite
    • cron
    • Linux

    Explore THE SYSTEM

The architecture that keeps it alive

  • engine

    The deterministic core. A pure Python rules engine behind FastAPI owns every number — XP, stat decay, streaks, rank. Sixty-six test files run against fully sandboxed state; a React PWA is in progress.

  • gateway

    Hermes, the voice. An AI agent gateway with two personas on Telegram: ARIA orchestrates and narrates, VULCAN dispatches and executes code jobs. The agents read and speak — they never change the numbers.

  • plugins

    Thirteen custom plugins. Habit logging, a verified planning loop, coding-job dispatch, journal capture, health checks — and a deterministic confirm-before-act gate, so the LLM never decides to act on its own. ~26k lines of Python.

  • cron

    The heartbeat. Scheduled jobs keep it alive: daily prompts, weekly journal synthesis and update briefs, 03:00 backups with a passed restore drill — plus a multi-provider LLM failover ladder built after root-causing a real outage.

04. Contact

Let’s talk

Two clear paths. Same inbox. English o español.

01 — Engineering

Backend, platform & agents

Roles, collab, and hard systems — APIs, reliability, commerce, or AI where the model doesn’t own the numbers.

Write me

02 — Digital Prodigy

Get online & get paid

Sites, discovery, WhatsApp automation, and payments for small businesses — EN/ES.

Write me