Portrait of Leo Rayner

Baxley, Georgia

Leonardo Rayner

RaynerCodes

AWS Certified Developer Associate | Backend & Cloud Engineer | Founder, LeverageCut and RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions | Python • SQL

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • AWS Lambda
  • DynamoDB
  • API Gateway
  • Docker
  • Stripe

Resume

Summary

Independent backend engineer and founder of RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions, specializing in Python and serverless AWS architecture — scalable, secure REST APIs and event-driven systems. Hands-on with AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, API Gateway, KMS, and Infrastructure as Code; skilled in FastAPI and Flask, JWT authentication with refresh token rotation, asynchronous processing, and Docker. AWS Certified Developer Associate and Cloud Practitioner, with demonstrated ability to design and deploy production-grade backend systems beyond standard CRUD functionality.

Experience

Independent Backend Engineer — RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions

Client: Debo's Boxing and Fitness (local business, Georgia)

  • Architected and deployed a full-stack serverless booking and payment platform using Python, FastAPI, AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway for a real paying client
  • Built end-to-end Stripe payment integration including webhook-driven order confirmation and automated conditional refunds based on real business rules
  • Solved a distributed race-condition problem where concurrent booking attempts could double-book the same time slot, implementing an atomic conditional-write claim mechanism in DynamoDB rather than a naive check-then-write pattern
  • Diagnosed and fixed a production timezone bug affecting real bookings, replacing a naive UTC-offset assumption with proper IANA timezone conversion to correctly handle daylight saving transitions
  • Implemented layered application security including progressive brute-force lockout on admin login, IP-based rate limiting and blocklisting, and least-privilege IAM policies scoped per AWS resource

Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • SQL

Cloud / AWS

  • Lambda
  • API Gateway
  • DynamoDB
  • SQS
  • S3
  • KMS
  • Secrets Manager
  • IAM
  • CloudFormation
  • SAM
  • EventBridge
  • CodePipeline
  • CodeDeploy
  • CloudWatch
  • X-Ray
  • EC2

Frameworks

  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • React
  • REST APIs
  • Mangum
  • Linux/Bash
  • CI/CD

Database

  • PostgreSQL
  • DynamoDB
  • SQLAlchemy
  • SQLite

Tools

  • Git
  • GitHub Actions
  • AWS SAM CLI
  • Docker
  • Docker Compose
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • Nginx
  • Pytest
  • Stripe
  • OpenAI API

About me

The beginning of my programming journey was in 8th grade — a Discord bot written in JS following a tutorial. The bots in the discord fasinated me and I wanted to make my own, but with actual code from scratch. It was simple and broke constantly. The codebase was a developer's nightmare, but it was my first real experience with programming and I loved watching my bot respond to commands in real time.

By 10th and 11th grade I'd moved to C# and Unity, trading small bot scripts for simple mini games — engines, physics, state, all of it. That's really where I learned to think in systems without knowing it. Instead of the old simple tutorials, I mostly was recreating simple child hood games under the name Space High Gaming. The name sparked from my love for space and games.

after graduation I got serious about programming and wanted a professional career in it. I taught myself everything from there. No bootcamp, no CS degree — just documentation, broken project deployments, and enough courage to fix every annoying mistake or bug in the code, most of the time even staying up all night at 6AM debugging. Python became home for this since the reason I got into backend was to better my AI Engineering foundation later. which was funny because back in school, in my computer science class I thought Python was a joke and I would never use it because I was coding in C# at the time. I was very much wrong. Then portfolio projects to AWS: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, KMS. I passed the AWS Certified Developer Associate and Cloud Practitioner exams on the first attempt, and eventually I shipped a fix upstream to SlowAPI, the rate-limiting library a lot of FastAPI projects depend on. All within months of being self-taught and a passion to build.

Currently I run RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions — I've built a live booking and payment platform for a real paying client, a fintech loan lending project API, apparently my own portfolio website (which your looking at now), and my own B2B SaaS product, LeverageCut. I'm looking for a professional backend or cloud engineering role, with healthcare and fintech at the top of my list, because in those environments the backend actually has to be right, not just functional, which is something I priortize when building systems. Cybersecurity and AI engineering are very interesting to me and they are the skills to follow.

Software (SaaS)

RaynerCodes Cloud Solutions

Personal Projects

Fintech Loan Lending Platform

A serverless loan lending API with credit-score based auto-decisioning, a one-way loan lifecycle state machine, and six separate customer-managed KMS keys to keep a security incident in one area from touching another.

  • Python
  • AWS Lambda
  • API Gateway
  • DynamoDB
  • SQS FIFO
  • KMS
  • CloudFormation

Content Moderation API

An AI-powered moderation API using GPT-4o mini to classify text as safe, flagged, or rejected. Celery and Redis handle the moderation call asynchronously with exponential backoff retry, so the API responds instantly instead of blocking on the model.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Celery
  • Docker
  • JWT

Get in touch

Hiring, collaborating, or just want to talk through something you're building — send it over.