Backend & API architecture
Service boundaries, RESTful APIs, reusable PSR‑4 packages. Designing the seams up front so the next five features don’t each turn into a negotiation.
Available for contract, fractional and full-time work
Backend systems that stay easy to change.
I’m Richard Mowatt. For 20+ years I’ve built and led production backends across healthcare, ad‑tech and eCommerce. Most of that work comes down to one thing: taking a system that grew sideways and giving it seams a team can build against.
What I do
Three problems I get called for
Legacy modernization
Decoupling a monolith in place, while the business keeps shipping. I’ve done this twice at scale, at gen.video and at Dell EMC, without a stop‑the‑world rewrite.
Search & data layers
Elasticsearch over legacy data, ingestion pipelines, faceted discovery APIs, index mappings and query tuning that hold up on real dataset sizes.
Health Recovery Solutions
Warehousing system rewrite
Architected the replacement from the ground up, in a shape that let the business move off NetSuite onto Stratix with almost no seam showing.
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gen.videoProprietary CMS to SOA
Split a legacy CMS into RESTful services with a dedicated Elasticsearch layer underneath discovery and filtering.
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Health Recovery SolutionsOutcomes platform architecture
Owned backend direction for a healthcare outcomes platform and a team of five, on Lumen microservices and shared packages.
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Contact
Got a system that’s getting harder to change?
Tell me what it does today and what you need it to do next. I’ll tell you straight whether I’m the right person for it.
Remote, with US hours overlap from La Paz, Mexico.