About
Robert Harnagea
I am a consultant, senior architect, and cloud database engineer based in Canada. My work sits where product requirements meet production reality: databases, APIs, infrastructure, reporting workflows, deployment automation, and the operational habits that keep systems reliable.
I started as a self-taught developer, moved to Vancouver, and spent years building real systems that had to work in production under real conditions. That path built a bias toward operational depth: understanding not just how to build something, but how to keep it running, how to change it safely, and how to recover when it breaks.
Today I work as Data Architect at Sycle, and I am building SiteRevo — my own product, currently in active development, that reflects the kind of systems work I find most interesting: Laravel, AWS, Aurora, and AI-assisted product features with real engineering backing.
Current Focus
- Data Architect at Sycle
- Building SiteRevo
- Senior consulting work
Location
Canada
Engineering Philosophy
Production-first thinking
Every design decision gets evaluated by how it behaves at 2 AM when something goes wrong.
Databases are not just storage
Schema design, replication, migration safety, and query behavior are architecture decisions — not afterthoughts.
Calm under pressure
Incidents get resolved with clear thinking, good runbooks, and honest post-mortems.
Product-minded engineering
Technical work serves business outcomes. If I cannot explain why something matters to the product, I question whether to build it.
Clear communication
Good engineering includes writing things down: architecture decisions, operational procedures, and honest status updates.
Selected Stack
Backend
- — PHP
- — Laravel
- — Queues / Horizon
- — APIs
- — Event-driven systems
Databases
- — Aurora MySQL
- — PostgreSQL
- — MySQL
- — Schema migrations
- — Replication & failover
Cloud & Infrastructure
- — AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, SQS, Lambda)
- — Route 53 / ACM
- — CloudWatch
- — IAM
DevOps
- — GitHub Actions
- — Docker
- — CI/CD pipelines
- — Zero-downtime deploys
AI & Tooling
- — LLM integrations
- — Extraction & classification pipelines
- — Git
- — Linux
- — Bash
Outside of Work
When I'm away from the keyboard I like hiking, snowboarding, and the kind of trance music you can actually lose track of time to. I grew up in Romania, moved to Canada, and found that new environment reshapes how you see problems — a perspective that still shows up in how I approach engineering.