About Antonio Perez

I am a Principal Platform Engineer and engineering leader with more than a decade of experience owning business-critical commerce, API, integration, data, and cloud platforms. Through Software Survivor, I help companies design and evolve systems around stable business capabilities so vendors, frameworks, infrastructure, requirements, and engineers can change without forcing a costly rewrite.

The best fit is a serious platform problem: a commerce ecosystem constrained by vendor boundaries, disconnected systems that create operational work, a legacy application that has become risky to change, or a migration that must preserve business continuity.

My work has supported 2.19M+ orders and $158.6M+ in commerce revenue, GraphQL services handling 20M monthly requests, and unified commerce operations across more than 100 retail locations. I have also reduced infrastructure cost by more than 90% and helped reduce internal API onboarding from seven days to approximately 30 minutes.

That experience shapes the way I work: build around business capabilities, make failure behavior explicit, isolate vendor details at deliberate boundaries, and optimize for the next engineer. I stay close to implementation while connecting architecture, delivery, reliability, and team growth across engineering, finance, analytics, fulfillment, marketing, and executive priorities.

Public Leadership and Products

• Technical author and speaker: I publish practical architecture writing through Software Survivor and presented the Fresno DevFest keynote “Leveraging LLMs for Search: Exploring Embeddings”.
• Candid Moments: I designed, built, and operate an event photo-sharing product with no-account QR uploads, private galleries, host controls, background media processing, moderation, payments, and production observability. Read the case study.
• FeelsReel: I built an AI storybook and video-generation workflow using OpenAI and RunwayAI. View the project.

How I Work

Start with the business capability. Before proposing a platform or migration, I want to understand what the business must keep doing, which constraints are real, where ownership lives, and what would happen if nothing changed.

Prefer the smallest responsible next step. Sometimes that is a new platform capability. Sometimes it is an adapter, an integration, a migration plan, an architecture review, or a focused modernization sequence that reduces risk before implementation.

Optimize for the next engineer. Architecture should make dependencies, failure modes, and ownership obvious enough that future engineers can contribute without reverse-engineering the whole business.

Stay close to delivery. The same Principal Platform Engineer shaping the architecture stays involved in the technical decisions that determine whether the work survives production.

Where Software Survivor Fits

• Platform architecture and modernization when valuable systems must evolve without a big-bang rewrite
• Commerce platform architecture across pricing, payments, loyalty, fulfillment, analytics, and finance
• Enterprise integrations with clear ownership, idempotency, operational visibility, and recovery paths
• API platforms and distributed systems that create engineering leverage instead of multiplying cognitive load
• Migration strategy and technical due diligence before a major vendor, data, infrastructure, or architecture decision
• Fractional Principal Engineer support for teams that need senior architecture judgment close to delivery
• AI integration when it creates measurable operational value inside a controlled workflow

What Makes the Engagement Different

You should come away from the first conversation with more clarity than you had before it. If there is a fit, the next step is scoped around an architecture decision, migration, integration, or platform outcome. If there is not a fit, I will say so and point you toward a better next step when possible.

Software Survivor is based in Fresno, California and works with Central California businesses and remote teams across the US.

Discuss a platform architecture problem when a system needs to change without losing the business capabilities that already work.