Backend
- PHP 8
- Symfony 7
- Laravel
- API Platform
- Doctrine ORM
- Drupal 10
Senior Software Engineer · Princeton University
Building robust web systems — production platforms, internal tools, and projects that ship.
A Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years of full-stack experience and a strong backend lean. Currently building and maintaining a suite of production web applications at Princeton University's Computer Science Department — serving faculty, staff, and students across teaching, research, and administration.
Most at home designing systems end-to-end — from the infrastructure up — and shipping side projects that scratch real itches. Originally from Albania, now based in Princeton, NJ.
A backend-leaning stack honed on a long-lived department codebase — with enough frontend and infra around it to own features end-to-end.
Computer Science Department
Own the CS Department's production web portfolio — Symfony and Drupal applications serving faculty, staff, and students — and the CI/CD and deployment infrastructure around it.
Senior PHP contractor placed through Proxify's European talent network — Phalcon, Laravel, and Vue.js client projects in parallel with the day role.
Owned the bank's public web portfolio end-to-end — design, development, and ongoing maintenance — while mentoring junior developers and driving product campaign releases.
Early-career development on the Zend MVC framework — contributing end-to-end from requirements through deployment.
A mix of side projects where I prototype ideas and work-built tools that stand on their own. One in active development, one running in production, and one in the App Store.
An AI-powered job search automation platform. Scrapes job boards, scores CVs against job descriptions, auto-generates tailored cover letters, and manages the entire pipeline via a Kanban board.
A Drupal 10 module that turns any content-heavy site into an AI-answerable knowledge base. Embeds and indexes site content, retrieves the most relevant chunks per query, and generates grounded answers with source links. Providers are swappable end-to-end: LLM (Anthropic Claude or local Ollama), embeddings (OpenAI or Ollama), and vector store (Qdrant or file-based). Ships with an admin dashboard that tracks queries, surfaces content gaps, and feeds thumbs-up/down back into the analytics loop.
A SwiftUI iOS app for building small daily habits. Features habit templates, motivational prompts, and an archive system for completed habit runs.
Got an interesting idea or a role worth talking about? I'd love to hear it. The fastest way to reach me is email — I read everything.
Email fisniklaci@gmail.com