Senior Backend Engineer with 8+ years of experience building scalable distributed systems in payroll, staff management, and financial reporting / notification platforms. Expertise in designing secure service-to-service integrations, high-availability architectures, and event-driven financial workflows. Proven ability to modernize legacy systems, improve reliability, reduce operational overhead, and deliver production-ready systems.
Technical Skills
Languages
Python, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, SQL, TypeScript, Go
Distributed Systems & APIs
gRPC/Protobuf, REST, Kafka, SQS, Lambda
Cloud & Infrastructure
AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker
Data & Observability
MCPs, Snowflake, Datadog, Looker
Experience
- Reliability & production scale — Operated and enhanced 15+ mission-critical payroll and staff management services serving 4M+ Square merchants, consistently meeting P99.99 availability SLOs and maintaining 500ms P99 latency in production.
- Core product system ownership — Led delivery of high-priority features for the Tip Attribution Service, improving customized tip distribution for 90% of merchants, and contributed to 15+ production services across time tracking, scheduling, and compliance enhancements.
- API & system integrations — Designed and implemented cross-system integrations: co-led beta launch of Team APIs job management endpoints for third-party developers, built secure RPC integrations between Cash App Taxes and Payroll to automate W-2 imports, and developed a tax filing transmitter covering all 50 states using event-driven workflows (SQS + Lambda).
- Infrastructure & cost reduction — Reduced Payroll database size by 30% and lowered operational overhead by architecting a DynamoDB-based archival system; introduced Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning for improved scalability.
- Initiative & AI innovation — Built an automated file conversion pipeline (90% success rate) and introduced an internal chatbot integrated with team support channels, standardizing documentation across 90% of recurring support cases and driving cross-team adoption.
- Technical ownership — Designed and owned development of a next-generation Financial Reporting platform, automating equity valuation and scalable data generation by decoupling calculation and reporting pipelines; implemented financial models (DCF, comparables) to support analyst workflows.
- Core platform development — Refactored legacy task processing systems to improve throughput and reliability, built RPC services for trading data ingestion, and developed internal CRM tooling to automate contract management and sales pipeline visibility.
- Research analysis — Built Django-based backend services and interactive visualizations, integrating five heterogeneous datasets for academic research and public exhibits to surface patterns and insights.