GET /career/rocky-balboa HTTP/2
Rocky Balboa
Senior Backend Engineer · Distributed systems & APIs
200OK
uptime 9 yrs · latency low
Response body · summary
Backend engineer, 9 years shipping payment and messaging APIs at scale.
I own services that must not go down: idempotent writes, careful retries,
and observability I can debug at 3am. I remove more code than I add.
Redirect history · 3xx
301
Staff Backend Engineer @ Northwind Pay
2022 → present
- Re-architected the ledger service; write throughput 4k → 31k tx/s, p99 -46%.
- Shipped idempotency layer that cut duplicate charges to 0 across 2024.
- Mentor 4 engineers; run the API design review that every service change passes through.
301
Backend Engineer @ Relaychat
2018 → 2022
- Built the fan-out delivery pipeline behind 1.2M concurrent sockets.
- Cut message delivery p95 from 840ms → 190ms with a rewritten queue.
429
Too Many Requests · the year everything paged at once
2020
- Kept messaging up through lockdown load, then took a real break and came back with a saner on-call model.
301
Software Engineer @ Quillbox
2016 → 2018
- First backend hire; stood up the invoicing service still running today.
Skills · 200 OK
Go92%
PostgreSQL88%
Distributed sys85%
Kafka / queues80%
gRPC / REST86%
Observability78%
Rust52%
Terraform70%
Education & side projects · 201 Created
201
B.S. Computer Science @ University of Colorado Boulder
2012 → 2016
201
idempotent-kit · open-source Go library
1.4k stars
- Drop-in idempotency keys for HTTP handlers; used in production by 3 companies I know of.
Currently · 1xx
100
Continue · in progress
- Learning Rust properly by rewriting a hot path of the ledger; 2 services migrated so far.
- Reading through the Raft paper again and building a toy consensus store on weekends.