Engineering Journal

Production Insights.

Deep dives into backend architecture, distributed systems, and AI infrastructure. Documenting the tradeoffs, failures, and lessons from building scalable products.

AI Infrastructure

12 min read

Why Hybrid Retrieval Beats Pure Vector Search in Production RAG

An analysis of why semantic similarity alone fails in production systems and how we implemented PostgreSQL FTS + Vector fusion to solve the 20% recall gap.

May 12, 2026

Distributed Systems

15 min read

Designing Kafka-Driven Ingestion Pipelines for High-Throughput AI Systems

Deep dive into the architectural decisions behind our 100k events/sec ingestion pipeline, focusing on backpressure, retries, and fault isolation.

May 05, 2026

Backend Architecture

10 min read

Thinking Beyond CRUD: Moving to Event-Driven Architectures

Why "Senior" backend engineering is about managing side effects and state transitions, not just creating REST endpoints.

April 28, 2026

AI Infrastructure

11 min read

Architecting an Intelligent Query Routing Engine

How we reduced LLM token costs by 60% by implementing a custom router that distinguishes between exact, semantic, and complex analytical queries.

April 15, 2026

SRE & Backend

14 min read

The Observability Gap: Beyond Just Logs and Metrics

Why standard logging fails in Kafka-driven architectures and how we implemented distributed tracing to solve "the phantom delay" problem.

April 02, 2026