About
Hey there
I’m Christian Campbell, a backend engineer with 13 years of experience building systems that help businesses scale and operate more efficiently.
What I Do Now
I specialize in AI integration and automation. That means taking messy, manual processes and turning them into intelligent systems that work while you sleep.
Recent work includes:
- Automated 20% of a support team’s ticket volume with a RAG-powered chatbot that answers customer questions from documentation
- Surfaced hidden UX issues from 10,000+ customer conversations using LLM-powered analysis and topic clustering
- 3x’d my own engineering output by building an agentic coding pipeline that handles research, planning, implementation, and code review
I’m currently building ManagerTools, an AI phone answering system for small businesses that handles calls, answers questions from a knowledge base, and books appointments.
My Stack
Primary: PHP, Laravel, Python, PostgreSQL, AWS (Lambda, S3, etc.)
AI/ML: OpenAI API, Claude API, RAG pipelines, BERTopic, sentence-transformers
Infrastructure: Cloudflare Workers, Pipedream, Docker
How I Work
I believe in shipping things that work, then iterating. No over-engineering. No building for hypothetical future requirements.
My approach:
- Understand the actual problem (not the assumed one)
- Research existing patterns and constraints
- Build the simplest solution that solves it
- Measure, learn, improve
I’ve learned the hard way that the best code is code you don’t have to debug at 2am. So I focus on clarity, maintainability, and getting alignment upfront.
Background
Before focusing on AI, I spent years at companies ranging from startups to enterprise:
- Tyler Technologies — Worked on criminal justice software serving government agencies
- HighLevel — Senior Backend Engineer on a SaaS platform with 80+ clients and millions of users
- Various freelance and contract work building custom business systems
Along the way I’ve debugged WordPress plugins, migrated reporting systems under hard deadlines, and learned that most problems come down to either missing indexes or unclear requirements.
What I’m Looking For
I’m currently taking on contract and freelance work focused on:
- AI/LLM integration (RAG systems, chatbots, embeddings pipelines)
- Backend API development (Python, PHP/Laravel)
- Automation and workflow optimization
- Data pipelines and analysis
I work best with teams that value pragmatism over process and shipping over theorizing.
Let’s Talk
If you’re building something that needs an experienced backend engineer who knows AI, I’d like to hear about it.