Alexandra Chen

Senior Software Engineer

alexandra.chen@email.com · +1 (415) 555-1234 · github.com/alexandra-chen · San Francisco, CA

Senior engineer specializing in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure. Led platform teams that process 50M+ daily transactions. Expert in system design, performance optimization, and building engineering cultures that ship reliable software at scale.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Platform

Stripe

San Francisco, CA
  • Architected and deployed distributed rate limiting service handling 2.5M requests/second across 12 AWS regions, reducing payment fraud by 34% while maintaining 99.99% uptime
  • Led migration from monolithic Ruby application to microservices architecture using Go and Kubernetes, improving deployment frequency from weekly to 50+ times daily
  • Built real-time observability platform integrating Datadog, Prometheus, and custom telemetry, reducing mean time to detection for production incidents from 12 minutes to 90 seconds
  • Mentored 8 engineers across 3 teams on system design and incident response, establishing on-call practices that reduced escalations by 60%

Staff Software Engineer

Airbnb

San Francisco, CA
  • Designed and implemented search infrastructure for 7M+ listings using Elasticsearch and Redis, serving 400K queries/minute with p99 latency under 150ms
  • Optimized data pipeline processing 12TB daily booking data, reducing compute costs by $1.2M annually through Apache Spark tuning and strategic caching
  • Established testing standards and CI/CD practices that reduced production incidents by 45% and increased deployment confidence across 200-person engineering organization
  • Led incident response for high-severity production issues, implementing postmortem culture that turned outages into systematic improvements

Software Engineer II

Google

Mountain View, CA
  • Built core features for Google Cloud Storage API, handling 10PB+ of data transfers daily with 99.95% availability SLA
  • Implemented automated capacity planning system using machine learning, predicting resource needs 6 months ahead with 92% accuracy
  • Contributed to internal distributed tracing framework adopted by 50+ teams, improving debugging efficiency across organization

Software Engineer

Dropbox

San Francisco, CA
  • Developed sync engine optimizations that reduced bandwidth usage by 40% for 300M+ active users
  • Built monitoring and alerting systems for file sync reliability, maintaining 99.9% sync success rate
  • Participated in on-call rotation, resolving critical production issues and improving system resilience

Technical Skills

Languages

Go, Python, Java, TypeScript, Rust, SQL

Infrastructure

Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Azure

Data Systems

PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, DynamoDB

Observability

Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger

Practices

System Design, Distributed Systems, Performance Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Leadership

Notable Projects

Open Source Contributions

Core contributor to Prometheus monitoring system (2.1K+ stars) with focus on query optimization and storage engine improvements. Maintainer of go-circuit-breaker library (890 stars) used by companies including Uber, Spotify, and Netflix.

Conference Speaking

Regular speaker on distributed systems and infrastructure topics. Presented at QCon San Francisco 2023 ("Building Resilient Distributed Systems"), KubeCon 2022 ("Kubernetes Observability at Scale"), and Strange Loop 2021 ("Performance Engineering for Real-Time Systems").

Technical Writing

Published articles on system design and engineering leadership reaching 500K+ readers. Featured in InfoQ, The New Stack, and internal engineering blogs at Stripe and Airbnb.

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science

Stanford University

Specialization in Distributed Systems and Database Theory. GPA: 3.9/4.0

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

UC Berkeley

Minor in Mathematics. Summa Cum Laude. GPA: 3.95/4.0

Certifications