Open to remote, hybrid (SI) & B2B work

Sandi Verdev

Senior Backend Engineer · PHP / Laravel · Python

I've been building and running PHP backends for 18+ years, 12+ of them fully remote for a US company. For 12 years I worked on a multi-tenant platform with 1,300+ sites and 20M+ registered users (9M+ active), keeping a ~3.4 TB MySQL database fast with caching and search.

Lately I build Laravel and Python/FastAPI services and ML/LLM tooling, using AI-assisted development with tests and code review. Based in Slovenia (CET), comfortable with US Eastern hours. I freelance as eAppz. CV available on request.

Find me online

Recent work

BikerPlanet, one of the sites on the platform

Multi-tenant dating platform

PHP · MySQL · Memcached · Sphinx · 2012–2024

1,300+ sites, 20M+ registered users. Tuned MySQL at ~3.4 TB / 9.9B rows, cut a push-notification job’s RAM by 56%, and rewrote core search with 98% test coverage.

Lesson Transcriber

Python · FastAPI · faster-whisper · pyannote · 2026

Self-hosted GPU API that transcribes mixed-language lessons with speaker labels and per-segment language detection, plus an optional LLM pass for a cleaned transcript.

Limit-order exchange

Laravel 12 · Vue 3 · Pusher · 2025

Order matching with escrow under row locks, bcmath money math, events sent only after commit, and CI on GitHub Actions.

Source on GitHub →

Photo with a green "Watermark" text overlay added by the plugin

Watermark RELOADED

WordPress plugin · since 2010

Automatic text watermarks for uploaded images. 170k+ downloads; the Dec 2025 update added security hardening, localization and coding standards.

WordPress.org →

Firebase notifications console

PHP · FCM HTTP v1 · 2025

Web console and PHP relay to compose push notifications, send them to device tokens and see the received payload. Also reference code for the whole flow.

Source on GitHub →