About

Backend engineer with 9+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems at scale. I focus on reliability, performance, and clean architecture. Currently leading the payments platform team at RippleFlow, where I drive the migration from monolithic services to event-driven microservices processing over $2B in annual transaction volume. Passionate about observability, system resilience, and mentoring engineers.

Experience

Senior Backend Engineer RippleFlow

Jan 2021 – Present
Payments Platform Team · San Francisco, CA
  • Architected and led migration from a monolithic payment engine to a domain-driven event-driven architecture using Go, Kafka, and PostgreSQL, reducing payment processing latency by 40% and enabling independent service deployments.
  • Designed a fault-tolerant idempotency layer handling 12,000+ transactions per second with 99.99% uptime during peak shopping events.
  • Built a real-time fraud detection pipeline using streaming analytics, reducing false positives by 28% while maintaining detection rates.
  • Mentored 5 junior engineers through structured code reviews, pair programming, and internal tech talks on distributed systems patterns.

Backend Engineer VaultData

Jun 2017 – Dec 2020
Data Infrastructure Team · Oakland, CA
  • Developed and maintained a high-throughput event ingestion service processing 50M+ events daily, serving as the backbone for real-time analytics products.
  • Reduced infrastructure costs by 35% by optimizing query performance in PostgreSQL and implementing automatic sharding and partitioning strategies.
  • Designed a gRPC API layer for internal microservices, cutting inter-service latency by 60% compared to the previous REST-based approach.
  • Led the adoption of Kubernetes and Helm charts for deployment, reducing release cycle time from 2 weeks to 3 days.

Software Engineer Nextera Systems

Aug 2014 – May 2017
Platform Engineering · Portland, OR
  • Built and maintained RESTful APIs for a fleet management platform serving 200+ enterprise clients, handling 2M+ requests daily.
  • Implemented a distributed job scheduler using Redis and RabbitMQ, improving task reliability from 92% to 99.7%.
  • Wrote comprehensive integration tests and contributed to CI/CD pipeline improvements, increasing deployment frequency by 4x.

Projects

Kratos

Go gRPC PostgreSQL Kubernetes

Open-source workflow engine for orchestrating multi-step data pipelines with built-in retry, observability, and tenant isolation. 1.2k stars on GitHub.

GitHub Docs

Pulse

Python Prometheus Grafana React

Lightweight service health dashboard that aggregates SLIs and SLOs across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Used internally by 3 teams.

GitHub

FluentMigrate

Go Docker gRPC

Database migration tool with zero-downtime schema changes for PostgreSQL. Supports canary deployments and automatic rollback on failure.

GitHub

Education

M.S. Computer Science

University of California, Berkeley
2013 – 2014 · GPA 3.9

B.S. Computer Engineering

University of Texas at Austin
2009 – 2013 · GPA 3.7

Awards & Achievements

  • RippleFlow Engineering Excellence Award (2023) — Recognized for architectural leadership in the payments platform migration.
  • Best Paper — USENIX SREcon 2022: "Practical Idempotency in Distributed Payment Systems".
  • VaultData Innovation Award (2019) — For designing a real-time data pipeline that reduced infrastructure costs by 35%.
  • First Place — CalHacks 2013: Built a real-time transit prediction system using streaming data from public APIs.
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