hire --sam

Senior backend engineer · payments and infrastructure · 8 years

Boring systems.
Exciting uptime.

I build the parts of a product nobody notices until they break: payments, queues and the databases behind them. My last system moved $2B a year and paged me twice.

Break my systemRésumé
sam@portfolio: ~
$
99.99%uptime on the payments API, 3 years
-62%p99 latency after the queue rewrite
40krequests a second at peak
11engineers mentored

01 · Try to break it

Knock out a server.

This is a simplified version of a payments system I designed. Click any box to take it down and watch traffic route around it. Click again to bring it back.

Success rate 100%Latency 42msAll systems normal.

02 · A year of commits

Shipping, steadily.

0 contributions in the last yearLongest streak 0 daysLess More

Hover a square.

03 · git log --oneline

Things I shipped.

-62%Queue rewrite

Moved payment retries from cron jobs to a Kafka pipeline. Fewer double charges, much faster refunds.

go · kafka · postgres
0Zero-downtime migration

Moved 3TB of ledger data to a new database while it took live traffic. Nobody noticed, which was the point.

postgres · logical replication
4×Faster deploys

Rebuilt CI so a change reaches production in 9 minutes, with automatic rollback.

kubernetes · argo · terraform
1.2kOpen source rate limiter

A small Go library other teams now use. 1,200 stars, and a very polite issue tracker.

go · redis

How I work

Write the runbook before the code. If I can't explain how it fails, I don't understand how it works.

Sam smiling

About me

Looking for my next hard problem.

I'm open to senior or staff roles on infrastructure or payments teams, remote or in Austin. I care about on-call that doesn't burn people out and code reviews that teach.

Hey, I'm Sam. Tell me about the scariest part of your system. That's usually where I can help most.

A real voice note, recorded for this sample. On your webfolio, it's your own voice.
Sam's design docs are the ones we use to teach new hires.engineering director
Calmest person on an incident call I've ever worked with.site reliability lead
He made me a better engineer in six months of code reviews.former mentee

sample references, written for this made-up engineer.

Remote or on-site?

Remote first, happy to travel monthly. Austin for hybrid.

Are you open to contract work?

For short architecture reviews, yes.

What's your notice period?

Two weeks.