Senior Software Engineer

Building systems that
actually scale

10+ years designing distributed architectures, leading cross-functional teams, and shipping products that millions of people rely on every day.

99.9%
Uptime delivered
~/portfolio — architect.ts
// Senior Software Engineer
 
const engineer = {
  name: "Alex Mercer",
  experience: 10 + " years",
  focus: [ "distributed systems",
         "platform engineering",
         "team leadership"],
  impact: () => "ships at scale"
};
 
build (engineer);
8
Engineers led

The engineer behind the infra

I specialize in backend platform work — the stuff that never makes it onto the landing page but keeps everything else running. Over a decade I've moved from writing individual features to designing the systems that entire product lines depend on.

I care about code that reads well years later, APIs that make the right thing easy, and teams where everyone ships with confidence. Strong opinions, loosely held when the data disagrees.

Distributed Systems
Cloud Architecture (AWS)
TypeScript / Node.js
Go
Kubernetes & DevOps
PostgreSQL / DynamoDB
React Kafka Redis Terraform GraphQL gRPC Prometheus Docker Python Rust

Where I've worked

2021 — Present
Stripe
Staff Software Engineer — Platform

Led a team of 8 to re-architect the payment routing engine, reducing median latency by 40% and enabling the platform to handle 3× peak throughput. Drove the migration of 200+ services to a new internal RPC framework with zero-downtime rollouts.

Go Kubernetes Kafka gRPC
2018 — 2021
Datadog
Senior Software Engineer — Observability

Built the ingestion pipeline for the metrics platform, handling 10 billion data points per hour at peak. Designed the multi-tenant isolation model still in production today. Mentored five engineers who went on to senior roles.

Go AWS DynamoDB Prometheus
2015 — 2018
Shopify
Software Engineer — Commerce Platform

Owned the inventory and fulfillment APIs used by 500k+ merchants. Led the move from a monolith to a modular service boundary, cutting deployment cycle time from days to hours. Shipped the Flash Sales feature handling 100k+ concurrent checkouts.

Ruby on Rails MySQL Redis React
2013 — 2015
Early-stage startups
Full-Stack Engineer

Joined two seed-stage companies as an early engineer. Wore every hat — product, backend, infrastructure — and shipped v1s under real time pressure. Invaluable experience in moving fast without breaking too much.

Node.js PostgreSQL AWS

Selected work

01
Flux — Distributed Task Scheduler

An open-source, fault-tolerant job scheduler built in Go. Supports priority queues, dead-letter handling, and horizontal scaling to millions of jobs per day.

Go Redis PostgreSQL gRPC
View on GitHub
02
Veil — Zero-Trust API Gateway

A lightweight API gateway with mTLS, JWT validation, and per-route rate limiting. Processes 50k req/s on a single instance with sub-millisecond overhead.

Rust Tokio Nginx
View on GitHub
03
Ledger — Event Sourcing Toolkit

TypeScript toolkit for building event-sourced applications. Provides aggregate roots, projection rebuilding, and snapshotting with pluggable event store backends.

TypeScript Kafka DynamoDB
View on GitHub
0+
Years of
engineering
0%
Latency reduced
at Stripe
0B
Data points
processed / hour
0.9%
Uptime on
production systems

Let's build something worth building

Open to senior and staff roles at companies tackling genuinely hard infrastructure or platform problems. Also happy to talk consulting, open-source collaboration, or speaking at your event.