About

The engineer behind 5AM

I'm Aleks — a Toronto-based senior software engineer and team lead with a decade of shipping products from zero to production. 5AM Consulting is how I do that work independently now.

The name is personal — born on the 5th, initials A.M. — but it's also how I work: the foundational, unglamorous engineering gets done early and properly, so the business is ahead by the time everyone else is awake.

What I do best

• E-commerce & loyalty. My spike. I've built and scaled loyalty solutions for e-commerce — points, rewards, and VIP tiers — across Shopify apps and custom storefronts, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, wired into tools like Klaviyo and Attentive.
• Modernization. I led the rebuild of a .NET monolith into a microservices platform with a new React dashboard — the kind of re-architecture that's expensive to get wrong.
• Large-scale migrations. I've moved thousands of merchants and millions of records onto a new platform, transforming points activity and loyalty rules without losing the thread.
• Platform APIs & integrations. At CBC, I built the REST APIs that unified CBC and Radio-Canada's separate streaming platforms into one in-house solution.
• Enterprise & public sector. Through ICF Next, I worked on the OESP program for the Ontario Energy Board (OEB), and cut report-generation times for the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG).

How I work

With discipline, on purpose. Typed contracts as a single source of truth. Architecture decisions written down (ADRs) so the "why" survives. Tests where they earn their keep, and infrastructure as code. I've led and mentored backend teams, set the development practices, and handled the bulk of code reviews — because how a team builds is as load-bearing as what it builds.

Business-fluent, not just technical

I hold a Master of Management Analytics from Queen's (Smith School of Business) on top of an engineering degree. It means I can sit in a roadmap conversation and a data conversation and an architecture conversation — and connect them. Senior engineering that understands why the business is asking is worth more than either half alone.