Piotr Szydło

.NET backend development & consulting · Kraków, Poland · remote-friendly

Backend systems that ship.
Cloud & AI that hold up in production.

I'm Piotr Szydło — a backend engineer with 7+ years of experience building .NET services on Microsoft Azure. I help product teams design reliable backend architecture, automate their cloud infrastructure, and integrate AI where it actually adds value.

Start a conversation What I do
  • .NET / C#
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Terraform & IaC
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • AI & LLM integration
  • M.Sc. Cybersecurity
Services

What I can do for you

I take on well-scoped consulting engagements and longer-term development work — as an extension of your team or as an independent specialist owning a workstream end to end.

Backend Systems Engineering

Design and delivery of production-grade backend services in C# / .NET — from a single API to a fleet of microservices.

  • REST APIs, microservices and modular monoliths (ASP.NET Core, EF Core)
  • Event-driven architecture: Azure Service Bus, MassTransit, outbox pattern
  • Multi-tenant SaaS backends with strict tenant isolation
  • Legacy modernization: framework upgrades, refactoring, performance work

Azure Cloud & DevOps

Cloud architecture and infrastructure automation so your environments are reproducible, auditable and cheap to run.

  • Infrastructure as Code with Terraform — full environment provisioning
  • CI/CD pipelines on Azure DevOps (Docker, multi-stage releases)
  • Azure Functions, App Services, Service Bus, Key Vault, App Configuration
  • Staging / QA / production environment strategy and cost control

AI & LLM Integration

Practical AI features for existing products — grounded in your data, measured with evaluations, not demos.

  • RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines with quality baselining
  • Multi-agent systems and tool-calling (MCP) on Azure AI Foundry
  • Evaluation harnesses: gold-set evals and synthetic health monitoring
  • Permission-aware AI: responses scoped to what each user may see

Security & Identity

Security built in from the start, backed by an M.Sc. in Cybersecurity and Microsoft security certifications.

  • Cybersecurity assessments of cloud architectures
  • Identity and access: Microsoft Entra, Azure AD B2C, RBAC design
  • Secrets management and secure configuration (Key Vault, managed identity)
  • Threat analysis for distributed and IoT-adjacent systems
Experience

Track record

Seven years of shipping backend and cloud systems for product companies. Client project names are omitted for confidentiality — I'm happy to walk through the details on a call.

  1. Backend Engineer · KodiakHub Current

    Feb 2025 – present · Kraków, Poland

    Backend engineer on a multi-tenant SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) SaaS platform, owning two core product modules and the platform’s AI capabilities.

    • Built an AI-powered search assistant as a multi-agent system on Azure AI Foundry: an LLM coordinator dispatching specialist agents backed by MCP tools, with forced tool grounding to eliminate hallucinated answers and permission-aware responses scoped to each user’s data.
    • Established the AI quality practice: gold-set evaluation suites running against live agents and a synthetic health-check job continuously probing the assistant in production.
    • Developed a workflow-automation module that turns platform events (rating drops, expiring documents, assessment results, schedules) into automatically created follow-up actions for suppliers.
    • Delivered hierarchical category management: multi-level category trees, bulk supplier assignment with async processing, and transactional integration events via the outbox pattern.
    • Led platform modernization: migrated services to .NET 10 and isolated Azure Functions, refactored the email/message broker service, and reduced database load.
    • Own DevOps and infrastructure as code across the team’s services: Terraform, Azure DevOps release pipelines (Docker, Linux agents), and provisioning of QA / staging / production environments.

  2. Backend Engineer · Sea

    Nov 2023 – Feb 2025 · Kraków, Poland

    Backend engineer in a software-house team delivering a custom B2B product to an external client end to end.

    • Designed and developed the solution’s REST APIs with Entity Framework Core over SQL Server, with background job processing on Hangfire (C#/.NET).
    • Implemented the identity layer on Azure AD B2C single-handedly — sign-up/sign-in user flows, token configuration, and API protection.
    • Built custom integrations against the client’s existing systems and data.

  3. Software Engineer · Relativity Poland

    Jun 2022 – Nov 2023 · Kraków, Poland

    Product engineering in a US-based legal-tech company building a new internal billing platform.

    • Co-designed the architecture and built the platform as an event-driven solution — a Kubernetes-hosted (Azure AKS) service backed by Azure Functions (C#/.NET).

  4. Software Engineer · ABB Business Services

    Jan 2019 – Jun 2022 · Kraków, Poland

    Industrial IoT backends for the marine division of a global engineering group.

    • Co-designed the architecture and developed cloud-native Azure microservices processing data files transmitted from ships at sea.
    • Conducted security assessments of the project, including a full cybersecurity assessment of the entire solution — threat analysis through recommendations.
    • Automated the Azure infrastructure with ARM templates and Azure Pipelines (CI/CD).
    • Developed and modernized a marine remote-diagnostics backend, optimizing performance and adding support for new device types (C#/.NET & .NET Framework, Azure, Angular, SQL, WCF).
Skills & credentials

Tools of the trade

Languages & frameworks

  • C#
  • .NET / .NET 10
  • ASP.NET Core
  • Entity Framework Core
  • SQL

Cloud & DevOps

  • Microsoft Azure
  • Azure Functions
  • Azure Service Bus
  • Azure AD B2C / Entra
  • Azure DevOps (CI/CD)
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes (AKS)

AI / ML

  • LLM integration
  • RAG pipelines
  • Multi-agent systems
  • MCP tool-calling
  • Azure AI Foundry
  • LLM evaluations

Architecture & practices

  • Microservices
  • Event-driven architecture
  • REST APIs
  • Multi-tenant SaaS
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • Cybersecurity assessments
Contact

Let's talk about your project

Whether you need a backend built, your Azure infrastructure tamed, or an AI feature that survives contact with production — describe your situation in a few sentences and I'll get back to you within two business days.

  • Project-based or ongoing engagements — flexible scope
  • You work directly with the engineer — no intermediaries
  • Based in Kraków (CET), working remotely across Europe

Your details are used only to respond to your inquiry and are never shared with third parties.