Most e-commerce backend problems are the ones your customers never see. Slow syncs. Broken integrations. Payment edge cases. Data that doesn’t line up across platforms. That’s the work I do, and I’ve been doing it for 13+ years.
Right now I’m embedded with a German enterprise client (Shopware) as a forward-deployed engineer — gathering requirements straight from business stakeholders and shipping payment and AI-driven e-commerce features end to end. I’ve also run live demos at Shopware Community Day, so I’m comfortable talking to your customers as well as writing the code.
What I can help with
1. E-commerce backend & integrations
Shopware and Laravel backends, payment gateway work, multi-platform product and order syncs, marketplace APIs, and the crawler/pipeline plumbing underneath. If two systems need to agree with each other and currently don’t, this is the one.
2. AI features inside existing apps
Adding LLM and AI capability to software that already exists and already has users — RAG over your own documents, semantic search, AI translation, queue-based inference that won’t blow up your response times or your API bill. I built a multi-tenant AI translation platform on Laravel with DeepL integration, glossary management and version control, shipped to enterprise clients.
3. Architecture rescue & performance
Monolith-to-microservices migration, event-driven redesign with Kafka or RabbitMQ, database and query optimisation. Usually called in when something works but is too slow, too fragile, or too scary to change.
Recent results
- Lab results pipeline: ~3 hours → ~3 minutes. Led the migration of a large monolith to microservices at Diag Laboratories, a clinical diagnostics provider — with 100% accuracy in PDF generation and 99% uptime maintained throughout a live migration. Team of 15.
- Multi-tenant AI translation platform. Lead backend developer on LinguFox for an enterprise e-commerce client: REST APIs, multi-tenant architecture, DeepL integration, OAuth/Passport auth, Laravel queues, CI/CD.
- E-commerce & social commerce suite. Owned two modules of PowerSell at Datamart — mass product decoration across marketplaces, plus unified Instagram/Facebook/Zalo management. Team of 10.
Stack
Backend: PHP/Laravel (12+ yrs), Python, Symfony, Yii
E-commerce: Shopware, marketplace & payment gateway APIs
Frontend: React, Vue, Livewire, Filament, Blade
Architecture: Microservices, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, event-driven, multi-tenant
Data & AI: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, LLM/RAG integration, TensorFlow & Keras
Infra: AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins, CI/CD
How I work
- Where I am: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (UTC+7). I work daily with teams in Germany and the US — comfortable overlap with European mornings and US evenings.
- How we start: a 30-minute call to understand the problem, then a written scope with timeline and price before any code is written. No surprise invoices.
- Communication: I talk to stakeholders directly, in plain language, and I document technical decisions before implementing them. You will always know where things stand.
- Rates: hourly engagements start at $50/hour. For clearly defined scopes I prefer fixed price, so you know the number up front.
- Availability: roughly 20 hours per week for new work.
Let’s talk
Tell me what’s broken, what you’re building, or what you’re stuck on. If I’m not the right fit I’ll say so, and where I can I’ll point you at someone who is.
Email: markng1993@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mark-nguyen-4027458b