About

Backend engineer with eight years of experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale. I focus on building resilient, observable infrastructure and high-throughput data pipelines. At two previous startups and one large cloud platform, I reduced latency, cut infrastructure costs, and improved developer velocity through thoughtful architecture and automation.

I write production software in Go, Python, and Rust, and I treat operations as a first-class engineering discipline. I believe in small, focused teams, rigorous testing, and systems that degrade gracefully under pressure.

Experience
Senior Backend Engineer Vantage Cloud · San Francisco, CA Jan 2022 – Present
  • Designed and implemented a multi-region event ingestion pipeline handling 2M+ events/second using Kafka, Go, and Avro; reduced P99 latency by 38% compared to the previous system.
  • Led migration of 60+ microservices from a monolithic CI/CD workflow to a GitOps-based deployment model on Kubernetes, cutting deployment time from 25 minutes to under 4 minutes.
  • Built a self-service internal developer platform (backed by Backstage and Terraform) that reduced new service provisioning time from 2 days to 15 minutes.
  • Introduced structured error budgets and SLO monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, improving incident response time by 40% and reducing pages by 55%.
Go Kafka Kubernetes Terraform Prometheus AWS
Backend Engineer Rivet Systems · San Francisco, CA Mar 2019 – Dec 2021
  • Owned the core payments platform — a set of gRPC services in Go handling $4B+ annual transaction volume with 99.99% uptime across three availability zones.
  • Redesigned the ledger database schema (PostgreSQL) and introduced read replicas and connection pooling, cutting query latency by 60% and eliminating weekly contention deadlocks.
  • Implemented a real-time fraud detection pipeline using Redis streams and Python, flagging suspicious transactions within 120ms and reducing false positives by 28%.
  • Mentored three junior engineers through structured pair programming and code review, leading to a 25% increase in team velocity over 6 months.
Go Python PostgreSQL Redis gRPC Docker
Software Engineer Nextera Robotics · Boston, MA Jun 2017 – Feb 2019
  • Developed real-time sensor fusion middleware in Rust for autonomous warehouse robots, achieving sub-10ms message delivery across a distributed node graph.
  • Designed a simulation framework that replayed production sensor logs to validate algorithm changes, reducing field-testing cycles by 70%.
  • Contributed to the ROS 2 migration effort, rewriting critical path planning nodes in Rust and improving worst-case execution time by 45%.
Rust ROS 2 C++ Linux Python
Software Engineering Intern Stripe · San Francisco, CA May 2016 – Aug 2016
  • Built an internal dashboard for monitoring API latency across regions, using React and a Go backend, adopted by 4 engineering teams.
  • Wrote integration tests for the payment intents API, increasing coverage from 68% to 91% and catching 3 production bugs before release.
Go React PostgreSQL
Education
M.S. in Computer Science Stanford University 2015 – 2017
B.S. in Computer Engineering University of California, Berkeley 2011 – 2015
Projects
Kronos · distributed task scheduler github.com/alexchen-dev/kronos
Open-source distributed cron and task scheduler built on etcd and Go. Supports cron expressions, dependency graphs, and automatic failover. Used by 3 organizations in production. ~1,800 stars on GitHub.
Go etcd gRPC Docker
Octor · Git operations library github.com/alexchen-dev/octor
A Rust library for programmatic Git operations: clone, fetch, rebase, and merge with conflict detection. Designed for automation pipelines and CI systems. Handles 10,000+ repositories/day at a major CI provider.
Rust Git libgit2
Vex · observability toolkit alexchen.dev/vex
Lightweight CLI tool for tailing and querying structured logs across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Supports streaming, filtering, and correlation with traces. Built with Go and OpenTelemetry. Adopted internally at Vantage Cloud.
Go OpenTelemetry Kubernetes CLI
Awards & Achievements
Best Paper Award — USENIX ATC 2023 for "Efficient Multi-Region Stream Processing with Bounded Staleness" 2023
Engineering Excellence Award — Vantage Cloud, Q4 2022 for leading the Kubernetes migration initiative 2022
1st Place, Stripe Internal Hackathon — Built a real-time API anomaly detection system using streaming ML 2016