“Make it work, make it right, make it fast
— in that order.”
Alex Chen
Senior Full-Stack Engineer & Cloud Architect
12+ years building resilient distributed systems at scale.
From microservices to Kubernetes clusters — engineering for 50M+ req/day.
About
Full-Stack Engineer Meets Cloud Architect
I'm a Senior Full-Stack Engineer and Cloud Architect with 12+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling production systems that serve millions of users.
Currently I lead platform engineering at Meridian Financial, where I architected a real-time transaction processing pipeline handling 50M+ requests per day with 99.99% uptime. I rebuilt their legacy monolith into a distributed microservices architecture on Kubernetes, reducing deployment times from hours to minutes and cutting infrastructure costs by 40%.
Before Meridian, I was a founding engineer at Cloudvane where I built their core API gateway from scratch — a system that now processes $2B+ in annual transaction volume. I've also led teams at Nexnode Labs and Brightpath Technologies, shipping everything from real-time collaboration tools to edge computing platforms.
My stack centers on Go, TypeScript, and Python with deep expertise in Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, and observability tooling. I'm passionate about developer experience, infrastructure-as-code, and building systems that are boring in production (the best kind).
I'm looking for my next challenge — ideally a principal or staff-level role where I can shape technical strategy while staying hands-on with the architecture.
Experience
12+ Years in Software Engineering
From full-stack development to platform engineering to cloud architecture — a career built on designing and scaling production systems.
Customer Impact
Real Results, Real Customers
Engineering engagements that drove measurable transformation across FinTech, Healthcare, and Enterprise SaaS.
Pinnacle Payments
Architected a real-time payment processing system for a top-20 US payment processor. Migrated from batch processing to streaming architecture, enabling instant settlements.
Enabled Pinnacle to offer real-time settlements — a competitive advantage that helped them win 3 enterprise contracts worth $15M ARR.
Atlas Healthcare Platform
Rebuilt the patient data ingestion pipeline for a healthcare analytics startup. Designed HIPAA-compliant infrastructure on AWS with end-to-end encryption and audit logging.
The new architecture passed their first SOC 2 audit with zero findings, unlocking enterprise healthcare contracts they'd been unable to pursue.
Stratosphere SaaS
Led the Kubernetes migration for a B2B SaaS platform serving 500+ enterprise customers. Implemented multi-tenant isolation, automated scaling, and blue-green deployments.
Deployment frequency went from weekly to 50+ times per week, accelerating feature delivery and reducing customer-reported bugs by 65%.
Testimonials
What Colleagues Say
Words from engineering leaders and peers who've worked with me firsthand.
“Alex is the engineer you want architecting your most critical systems. He has an uncanny ability to anticipate failure modes and design around them. Our platform reliability went from 99.9% to 99.99% under his leadership.”
“I've worked with a lot of senior engineers, and Alex stands out for his ability to make complex distributed systems understandable. He doesn't just build — he teaches. Our entire team leveled up working alongside him.”
“Alex took our prototype API gateway and turned it into a production system processing billions of dollars in transactions. His attention to correctness and operational excellence is exceptional.”
“What makes Alex rare is his full-stack thinking. He's equally comfortable optimizing a database query, designing a React component, or debugging a Kubernetes networking issue. He sees the whole system.”
“Alex built our entire CI/CD pipeline and Terraform infrastructure from scratch. What used to take our team days now takes minutes. He's a force multiplier for any engineering org.”
Thought Leadership
Published Work & Recognition
Blog posts, conference talks, and technical writing featured in industry publications.
Designing Go Microservices for Financial Systems
Deep dive into building financial-grade Go services — covering idempotency, distributed transactions, and exactly-once processing patterns.
March 2024From Monolith to Microservices: A Practical Migration Guide
Lessons learned from migrating a 500K-line Java monolith to Go microservices on Kubernetes — what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently.
November 2023Kubernetes Cost Optimization at Scale
KubeCon NA 2023 talk on reducing Kubernetes costs by 40% using Karpenter, spot instances, and right-sizing — with real production data from Meridian Financial.
October 2023Building Observable Systems with OpenTelemetry
GopherCon 2023 talk on implementing distributed tracing across 40+ microservices using OpenTelemetry, with practical tips for Go developers.
April 2023Featured In
Technical case study on the architecture patterns and operational practices behind Meridian's high-availability transaction processing system.
Kestrel, Alex's open-source API gateway, featured alongside Kong and Envoy for its performance characteristics.
Recognized for technical leadership in building scalable financial infrastructure at Cloudvane and Meridian Financial.
Detailed writeup of the Meridian Financial Kubernetes migration — from planning to production with zero customer-facing downtime.
Interview about why Go is becoming the language of choice for high-performance financial systems.
Projects
Built, Not Just Theorized
I don't just talk about AI — I build with it. Here are the tools and platforms I've created.
Kestrel
Open-source API gateway built in Go with sub-millisecond routing, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and OpenTelemetry tracing. Handles 100K+ requests/second on modest hardware.
Terraform AWS Blueprints
Production-ready Terraform modules for AWS EKS, RDS, VPC, and observability stack. Used by 3 companies I've worked at and 200+ GitHub stars.
Lattice
Real-time event streaming platform with exactly-once delivery semantics. Supports Kafka and NATS backends with a unified consumer API.
Vanguard CLI
Developer experience CLI for bootstrapping microservices with built-in observability, health checks, graceful shutdown, and Kubernetes manifests.
This Website
An AI-powered interactive resume built with Next.js and React. Features a chat widget powered by Gemini that can answer questions about my experience. The site itself demonstrates my frontend craft.
Skills
The Full Spectrum
Professional
Technical
Education & Certifications
Continuous Learning
B.S. Computer Science
University of Texas at Austin
2008 – 2012
AWS Solutions Architect Professional
Amazon Web Services
Certified
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Certified
HashiCorp Terraform Associate
HashiCorp
Certified