Senior Backend Engineer
Passionate about building scalable, maintainable backend systems that power millions of users. Specialized in system architecture, microservices, and high-performance distributed systems.
System Architecture
Microservices Expert
High Performance
Millions of Requests
Growth Mindsets
Work Experience
May 2022 - Present
Remote
Building scalable backend systems for billions of users.
Key Achievements:
- Architected and implemented scalable distributed systems using technologies like gRPC, Kafka, and RocksDB, reliably handling 10M+ requests per second with minimal tail latency.
- Led end-to-end backend architecture for high-visibility social features, coordinating across product, infra, and frontend teams to ship services that reached 2B+ users globally.
- Reduced average database query latency by 40% by rewriting inefficient SQL queries, adding composite indexes, and introducing read replicas and connection pooling.
- Mentored 5+ junior engineers, conducting weekly system design reviews, pair programming sessions, and onboarding tutorials, resulting in faster ramp-up and improved code quality.
- Spearheaded a migration from monolithic services to containerized microservices on Kubernetes, improving service isolation, deployment velocity, and team autonomy.
- Built resilient asynchronous job pipelines with retry logic and dead-letter queues, ensuring eventual consistency and fault tolerance in user notification and feed systems.
- Implemented comprehensive observability and alerting using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, reducing mean time to detect and resolve incidents by 60%.
- Collaborated cross-functionally with product managers, data scientists, and SREs to prioritize technical debt and optimize user-facing performance at global scale.
- Contributed to internal backend tooling libraries, standardizing service bootstrapping and configuration management, which reduced new service spin-up time by 70%.
Technologies:
June 2019 - April 2022
Los Gatos, CA
Focused on improving video streaming quality and building stable backend systems.
Key Achievements:
- Optimized video streaming pipeline, reducing buffering incidents by 35% through improvements in CDN routing logic, request prioritization, and caching strategy.
- Implemented adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms leveraging real-time network telemetry to dynamically adjust video quality, significantly improving playback stability and user satisfaction.
- Engineered fault-tolerant, horizontally scalable systems that reliably supported 200M+ concurrent global users, incorporating circuit breakers, fallback strategies, and auto-scaling patterns.
- Designed and built an internal A/B testing framework for streaming experiments, enabling statistically valid comparisons of playback features and significantly accelerating hypothesis validation cycles.
- Collaborated with data science and client teams to instrument playback metrics and QoE (Quality of Experience) signals, which informed product decisions and ML model tuning.
- Spearheaded integration of edge-based caching strategies and client-aware load balancing, reducing latency for global users by up to 20% during peak traffic.
- Participated in an incident response on-call rotation, resolving production issues under SLA constraints, and contributed to postmortem analysis to harden systems against future regressions.
Technologies:
July 2017 - May 2019
Pittsburgh, PA
Migrated monolithic architecture to microservices and scaled backend systems.
Key Achievements:
- Led migration of a legacy monolithic logistics platform to a modular microservices architecture, enabling faster development cycles, independent deployments, and improved fault isolation.
- Scaled backend systems to handle millions of API requests per day with 99.9% uptime, leveraging horizontal scaling, database sharding, and efficient resource utilization strategies.
- Implemented an event-driven architecture using RabbitMQ, decoupling critical workflows such as shipment tracking, billing, and notifications, and increasing system resilience and throughput.
- Reduced deployment time from hours to minutes by designing and implementing a robust CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins and Docker, automating build, test, and rollout processes.
Technologies:
Education
Graduation Year
2017
Focus Areas
Software Engineering, Algorithms
Relevant Coursework:
Featured Projects
Led backend architecture and implementation of a high-throughput social graph engine powering new social interactions across Facebook. Designed to handle over 10M requests/sec with minimal latency, the system enabled scalable creation, update, and retrieval of dynamic social relationships in real time.
Challenge
Ensuring system consistency and low tail latency at massive scale under unpredictable traffic bursts.
Solutions
Technologies
Led the backend development and optimization of Netflix’s global video streaming pipeline, focusing on real-time playback quality, fault tolerance, and user experience. Delivered system improvements to reduce buffering, enhance adaptive bitrate switching, and support massive concurrency across devices and geographies.
Challenge
Maintaining low latency and high playback stability for 200M+ concurrent users under volatile global network conditions, without degrading video quality or overwhelming CDNs.
Solutions
Technologies
Led the backend transformation of a high-traffic freight logistics platform from a legacy monolithic architecture to a microservices-based system. The goal was to enable scalability, modular deployment, and faster iteration for engineering teams, while maintaining high availability during peak shipping cycles.
Challenge
Decoupling tightly coupled business logic and stateful workflows without causing service downtime or regressions across logistics operations.
Solutions
Technologies
Skills & Expertise
Technical Skills
Soft Skills
Core Principles
Scalability First
Security Minded
Observability
Clean Code
Essential Reading
Books that shaped my approach to backend architecture and personal growth
Essential for understanding distributed systems and data architecture.
Comprehensive guide to microservices architecture and best practices.
Principles for building maintainable and scalable software systems.
Best practices for building and maintaining large-scale systems.
Understanding DevOps principles and organizational transformation.
Developing growth mindset for continuous learning and improvement.
Let's Connect
© 2025 Kyler Post. Built with passion for backend engineering.