Mathias Bala

Backend engineer. Python, Django, AI infrastructure. I build systems that run in production.

Available for remote contract work. WAT / UTC+1, overlapping European and US Eastern hours.

Selected work

Karamelion

AI document intelligence platform for Nigerian law students.

  • 200+ users on a live product with paying subscribers
  • Full backend on Django and DRF serving a web client, a React Native mobile client, and admin tooling from one versioned REST API
  • LLM orchestration layer routing across multiple providers by task and cost, with structured output validation, retry and fallback, and citation grounding against source documents
  • Document ingestion and retrieval pipeline: parsing, chunking, embedding, citation-linked retrieval, handwritten note ingestion via a multimodal model
  • Python
  • Django
  • DRF
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • AWS EC2
  • OpenAI
  • Gemini

NDVS

National identity infrastructure for Nigerian law students, under LAWSAN.

  • Sole engineer. 820+ students onboarded to date
  • Multi-step onboarding, automated identification number generation, transactional email, payment-gated registration
  • Role-based access control across national, zonal, state, and campus tiers
  • Owned deployment, migrations, monitoring, and incident response for a system used by a national student body
  • Python
  • Django REST Framework
  • PostgreSQL
  • RBAC

Green Livestock Africa

Livestock services platform for smallholder farmers across Africa.

  • Sole engineer. Next.js client on a Django and DRF backend
  • Livestock marketplace with per-animal provenance: documented genetics and linked health records
  • Herd health cards generating species-specific vaccination and treatment schedules for goats, sheep, cattle, and poultry
  • Farm store, hatchery orders, insemination bookings, and training cohort enrolment served from one REST API
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Django
  • DRF
  • PostgreSQL

LSS ABU Voting System

Election platform for a university student body.

  • 6,400+ votes recorded in a single election cycle
  • 300% increase in student participation
  • Authentication, vote integrity controls, live result tabulation
  • Python
  • Django
  • PostgreSQL

Architecture

Web / mobile clientDjango + DRF APIPostgreSQLCelery workersRedis (broker + cache)AI routing layerOpenAI / GeminiRETRIEVALparse → chunk → embed → vector search → citation grounding

Scroll sideways to see the full path.

Request pathAsync path
Karamelion request path. Long-running AI work stays off the request thread.

Experience

  • Senior Full Stack Developer, Benmore Technologies (Chicago, remote)

    Sep 2025 — Apr 2026

  • Founder and Lead Backend Engineer, Karamelion

    2025 — present

  • Deputy Director and Lead Engineer, LAWSAN National Identity Commission

    2025 — present

  • Chief Technology Officer, Dayilo Technologies

    2022 — 2023

Stack

  • Python
  • Django
  • DRF
  • FastAPI
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • RabbitMQ
  • PostgreSQL
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • Nginx
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript