David Brown
(233) 821-7453 ◇ San Francisco, CA
david@brown.com ◇ linkedin.com/in/david-brown ◇ github.com/david-brown
Objective
Backend Developer with 6+ years of experience building distributed systems across finance and SaaS, seeking a senior backend engineering role. Reduced API response time by 60% through asynchronous processing and query optimization, and has scaled services to millions of concurrent users. Focuses on building infrastructure that scales without sacrificing reliability.
Education
Relevant Coursework: Distributed Systems, Databases, Operating Systems, Algorithms.
Certifications
Skills
- Rust, Go, Node.js, TypeScript, Python, SQL
- Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Argo CD
- Microservices Architecture Design
- PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch
- REST, gRPC, GraphQL, Apollo Federation
- Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, RabbitMQ
- Event-Driven and Distributed System Design
- AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, EKS), GCP
- API Security, OAuth 2.1, JWT, mTLS
- CI/CD, GitOps, Blue-Green Deployments
- Real-Time Payment Processing Systems
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
- Financial Data Pipeline Optimization
- Database Indexing, Sharding, Replication
- Risk Management Algorithm Development
- Load Testing, Profiling, Capacity Planning
- Regulatory Compliance (PCI-DSS, SOC 2)
- Jest, Cypress, pytest, Testcontainers
Experience
- Architected and deployed a microservices ecosystem using Rust and gRPC, reducing API latency by 78% and enabling the platform to handle 3.5M concurrent users during peak traffic events.
- Spearheaded the adoption of GitOps workflows with Argo CD and Terraform, decreasing deployment times from hours to under 8 minutes while improving infrastructure reliability by 99.98%.
- Led a cross-functional team of 7 engineers to implement a real-time data processing pipeline with Apache Kafka and Flink, processing over 2TB of daily data and cutting analytics delivery time from days to seconds.
- Introduced OpenTelemetry tracing and Grafana dashboards across 20+ services, reducing mean time to resolution for production incidents from 45 minutes to under 10.
- Designed a multi-region failover strategy with automated health checks, sustaining 99.99% availability through two upstream cloud provider outages.
- Redesigned authentication system using OAuth 2.1 and JWT with hardware security modules, eliminating credential-based attacks and reducing user login friction by 42%.
- Optimized PostgreSQL database performance through custom indexing strategies and query refactoring, cutting average response times from 1.2s to 85ms while handling 3x more transactions.
- Developed and integrated a GraphQL API layer with Apollo Federation that unified 6 disparate data sources, enabling frontend teams to ship features 40% faster during Q3 product launch.
- Built an idempotent payment reconciliation service processing 400K transactions daily, reducing manual finance-team corrections by 90%.
- Established API versioning and contract-testing standards adopted across 4 client engagements, eliminating breaking-change incidents in production.
- Built RESTful APIs using Node.js and Express that powered core business functionality, achieving 99.9% uptime and supporting 150K daily active users.
- Implemented automated testing suite with Jest and Cypress, increasing code coverage from 62% to 91% and reducing production bugs by 47% within six months.
- Collaborated with DevOps to containerize backend services using Docker and Kubernetes, streamlining the local development environment and cutting onboarding time for new developers from 2 weeks to 3 days.
- Migrated a 400GB monolithic database to a sharded PostgreSQL cluster with zero downtime, improving write throughput by 5x.
- Added Redis caching to the 10 highest-traffic read endpoints, reducing database load by 62% and infrastructure spend by $8K per month.
Projects
Real-Time Data Pipeline. Designed a Kafka and Flink streaming pipeline that ingests and processes over 2TB of event data daily, replacing a nightly batch job and reducing analytics delivery time from days to seconds. Handles exactly-once semantics with checkpointed state and automatic backpressure recovery.
Federated GraphQL Gateway. Built an Apollo Federation layer unifying 6 disparate backend services behind a single schema, letting frontend teams ship features 40% faster without coordinating across service owners.
GitOps Deployment Platform. Implemented Argo CD and Terraform workflows with automated rollback and drift detection, taking deployments from a multi-hour manual process down to under 8 minutes at 99.98% reliability.
Rate Limiter Library. Open-source Rust crate implementing sliding window and token bucket algorithms backed by Redis. Used in production by 3 internal teams and 200+ downloads per week on crates.io.
Extra-Curricular Activities
- Write a backend engineering blog on distributed systems and database internals, read by 15K+ developers per month.
- Contribute to open-source Rust and Node.js tooling, with merged PRs in async runtime and database driver projects.
- Compete in system design and algorithm challenges; finished in the top 5% of two national coding competitions.
Leadership
- Mentor 4 junior engineers through weekly system-design sessions; 2 have since been promoted to mid-level roles.
- Author internal backend engineering guidelines on API design, error handling, and observability, now standard onboarding material for new hires.
- Speaker at Bay Area Backend Meetup on scaling event-driven systems with Kafka and Flink.
- Led the backend guild of 12 engineers, running architecture reviews and setting technical direction across 3 product teams.

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