Julian Wiley

The FastAPI, Celery, and ledger loop

February 6, 2026· 1 min readAgentic Quant Platform

How API requests become durable quant platform work.

Agentic Quant PlatformSystems DesignLocal FirstDevelopment Timeline

Why this mattered

A research UI can feel interactive while the actual work happens in workers.

This belongs in the development timeline because Agentic Quant Platform is not a single feature. It is a local-first quant research and trading platform with FastAPI, Celery, Postgres, Iceberg, DuckDB, MLflow, Redis-backed RAG, strategy factories, agents, bots, streaming, and paper trading. The project only became useful once its infrastructure decisions were written down well enough to be repeated.

Design decision

FastAPI stays thin, Celery owns long-running tasks, and the ledger records durable outcomes instead of passing ORM objects around.

The practical stack around this decision includes Python, FastAPI, Celery, Redis, Postgres, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Iceberg, DuckDB, MLflow, LiteLLM, CrewAI, LangGraph, vectorbt-pro, Kafka, Flink, Next.js. I try to keep the interfaces small: configuration describes intent, runtime code owns behavior, and operational notes explain what a future maintainer should check first.

What I would repeat

That separation is what lets backtests, ingest jobs, ML flows, and agents share the same operational shape.

The repeatable pattern is to make the boring path explicit. For this project that means clear repository boundaries, documented setup, predictable deployment commands, and enough observability to know whether the system is healthy or merely quiet.

Reader takeaway

If you are building something similar, start with the workflow you need to repeat every week. Then add only the platform pieces that make that workflow easier to recover, explain, and extend.