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Spectra Template

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Alex Chen
Senior Software Engineer

Summary

Senior software engineer with 7+ years building distributed systems at scale. Led platforms serving 200M+ MAU, owned multi-million-dollar infrastructure migrations, and mentored 10+ engineers. Strong in Go, TypeScript, and Kubernetes; experienced across web, mobile, and ML serving stacks.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer
Stripe · San Francisco, CA
Jun 2023 – Present
  • Led migration of the payment routing service from Ruby to Go, cutting p99 latency from 240ms to 85ms and saving $1.8M/year in compute cost.
  • Designed an idempotency framework now used across 14 teams, eliminating 92% of duplicate-charge incidents over 6 months.
  • Owned the 0→1 launch of a fraud-scoring pipeline processing 50M events/day, reducing chargeback rate by 28%.
  • Mentored 4 engineers (2 promoted to senior); ran the eng-onboarding bootcamp for 32 new hires.
  • Authored the team's API design RFCs; reviewed 200+ PRs/quarter with sub-12-hour median turnaround.
Software Engineer II
Airbnb · Seattle, WA
Aug 2020 – May 2023
  • Rebuilt the search-ranking service in Kotlin + gRPC, improving booking conversion by 11% ($90M annualized GMV lift).
  • Migrated 400+ legacy MySQL queries to a new sharded Postgres cluster, cutting read latency 3× under peak load.
  • Shipped real-time pricing experiments to 50% of hosts; A/B framework adopted as the platform standard across 7 teams.
  • Led on-call rotation for the booking-platform tier; reduced Sev-1 incidents from 6/quarter to 1/quarter.
Software Engineer
Square (Block) · San Francisco, CA
Jul 2018 – Jul 2020
  • Built the merchant onboarding API in Java, reducing time-to-first-transaction from 4 days to 11 minutes for 80% of applicants.
  • Implemented address-validation service handling 12M requests/day; sustained 99.99% uptime over 18 months.
  • Drove adoption of OpenTelemetry across 9 services; cut mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) from 14 min to 90 sec.

Education

M.S., Computer Science
Stanford University · Stanford, CA
Sep 2016 – Jun 2018

Focus: distributed systems, machine learning. GPA 3.94/4.0. TA for CS 244B (Distributed Systems).

B.S., Computer Engineering
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Champaign, IL
Aug 2012 – May 2016

Magna cum laude · Dean's List 8 semesters · ACM ICPC regional finalist.

Projects

ratelimit-rs — Creator

Open-source distributed rate limiter written in Rust. 4.2k★ on GitHub, used by 8 companies in production. Sub-millisecond p99 for token-bucket and sliding-window algorithms.

llm-cache — Author

Semantic caching layer for Claude / OpenAI APIs — cuts inference cost 40% with <0.5% accuracy loss. Featured in The Sequence newsletter (15k subscribers).

kube-cost-saver — Contributor

CNCF Sandbox project. Co-authored the cost-aware HPA controller and shipped the dashboard plugin used by 60+ orgs to right-size Kubernetes clusters.

Skills

Languages
Go · TypeScript · Python · Rust · Java · Kotlin · SQL · Bash
Infrastructure
Kubernetes · Terraform · AWS · GCP · Docker · Istio · ArgoCD · Helm
Data
PostgreSQL · Redis · Kafka · Snowflake · ClickHouse · BigQuery · dbt
Frameworks
Next.js · React · Node.js · gRPC · GraphQL · OpenTelemetry · Spring
Practices
Distributed systems · on-call · mentoring · RFC writing · A/B testing

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional · Amazon Web Services · 2024
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) · CNCF / Linux Foundation · 2023
Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect · Google Cloud · 2022

Awards

Stripe Eng Excellence Award · Stripe · 2024

Top 1% of engineers globally — awarded for the payment-routing migration.

Hackathon Grand Prize · Airbnb HackDays · 2022

Won grand prize (out of 240 teams) for an experiment-platform prototype shipped to production within 6 weeks.

Languages

English · Native · Mandarin · Fluent · Spanish · Conversational

About this template

Spectra uses a spectrum-coloured accent column for Skills and Languages. Creative-leaning, but the DOM order is single-column-equivalent so ATS systems read it correctly.

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