About Antonio Perez

I design software platforms that make change inexpensive.

I am Antonio Perez, a Principal Platform Engineer and engineering leader with more than a decade of experience. Through Software Survivor, I help businesses change the systems they depend on without rebuilding everything around them.

That work often starts with a practical problem: two systems disagree, an application has become risky to change, or a migration must happen while customers keep buying. I organize the software around what the business needs to do, such as taking payments or fulfilling orders. That gives teams a clearer place to make changes when vendors, requirements, or people change.

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

That experience shapes how I work: make failures understandable, keep vendor-specific details in one place, and make the system easier for the next engineer to maintain. I stay close to implementation and work across engineering, finance, analytics, fulfillment, marketing, and leadership to connect technical decisions with business needs.

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. Guests upload through a QR code without creating an account. Hosts manage private galleries, with moderation, payments, and media processing built into the service. 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? Who owns the decisions? What happens if nothing changes?

Prefer the smallest responsible next step. That may be a focused review, a better connection between systems, or a migration plan. Build the evidence needed for the larger decision before committing to the larger project.

Optimize for the next engineer. Engineers should be able to see what depends on what, who owns each part, and what happens when something fails. They should not have to reconstruct the whole business before making a safe change.

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 software needs to change without a full rewrite
• Commerce platform architecture when pricing, payments, loyalty, fulfillment, analytics, and finance must work together
• Enterprise integrations when systems disagree and staff need a reliable way to resolve failed updates
• API platforms and distributed systems when engineers need clear, reusable ways to connect services
• Migration strategy and technical due diligence when a major technical investment needs an independent assessment
• Fractional Principal Engineer support when a team needs senior architecture judgment close to delivery
• AI integration when a controlled workflow can produce measurable operational value

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, we will scope the next step around a specific decision or 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 Your Platform Challenge when a system needs to change without losing the business capabilities that already work.