Alex Chen

Led backend architecture for real-time streaming data platform serving 50M+ daily events. Managed team of 4 engineers and established engineering standards for Go services. Owned service reliability with 99.99% uptime SLA. Mentored junior engineers and drove adoption of AI-assisted development workflows using Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. Defined CI/CD pipelines, incident response protocols, and performance benchmarking practices.

Real-Time Event Processing Platform

• Designed and built a high-throughput event processing platform handling 2M events per second with sub-100ms latency. Replaced legacy Java monolith with Go microservices.
• Go 1.21, Kafka, Redis Cluster, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus, Jaeger
• Led architecture design, implemented core ingestion pipeline, established SLOs and monitoring, mentored team on Go idioms and concurrency patterns
• Tech Stack: Go Kafka Redis PostgreSQL Kubernetes gRPC Prometheus Jaeger Claude Code
• Challenges: Throughput Optimization: Achieved 2M events/sec by implementing batching, connection pooling, and zero-allocation hot paths using sync.Pool and arena-like patterns.
• Challenges: Latency Reduction: Reduced p99 latency from 450ms to 85ms through gRPC streaming, Redis pipelining, and PostgreSQL query optimization with prepared statements.
• Challenges: AI-Assisted Refactoring: Used Claude Code for repository-context exploration and automated test generation, cutting refactoring time by 40% with human-supervised validation.
• Challenges: Reliability Engineering: Built circuit breaker and bulkhead patterns with custom Go middleware, achieving 99.99% uptime over 12 months.

Federated Identity Service

• Built OAuth 2.0 and OIDC-compliant identity federation service connecting enterprise customers to 200+ SaaS integrations.
• Go, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, etcd, Vault, PostgreSQL, Envoy, Istio
• Designed token lifecycle management, implemented PKCE and device authorization flows, led security audits and penetration testing remediation
• Tech Stack: Go OAuth 2.0 OIDC etcd HashiCorp Vault PostgreSQL Envoy Istio
• Challenges: Security Compliance: Achieved SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance with automated evidence collection and zero critical findings.
• Challenges: Multi-Tenant Isolation: Implemented row-level security and namespace isolation ensuring complete tenant data segregation at database and cache layers.

Developed backend services for data pipeline orchestration platform. Built REST and gRPC APIs, implemented database schemas, and contributed to CI/CD automation. Collaborated with senior engineers on microservices architecture and learned production debugging practices.

Pipeline Orchestration Engine

• Built workflow engine for scheduling and executing ETL pipelines with dependency management and retry logic.
• Go, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Docker, AWS ECS, CloudWatch
• Implemented DAG-based scheduler, worker pool pattern for task execution, and REST API for pipeline management
• Tech Stack: Go PostgreSQL RabbitMQ Docker AWS ECS GitHub Copilot
• Challenges: Scheduler Performance: Designed priority queue with custom heap implementation reducing scheduling overhead by 60%.
• Challenges: AI-Assisted Onboarding: Used GitHub Copilot for test generation and documentation updates, accelerating feature delivery by 25% with mandatory code review.