Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems & AI Pipelines

Elaine Wang

U.S. PERMANENT RESIDENT ********@*****.*** 602-***-**** LinkedIn Cupertino, CA

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Backend engineer with 5+ years of experience building distributed systems, microservices, and data pipelines in Java and Python across logistics platforms and AI-powered consumer applications. PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Stealth Startup (AI-Driven Pet Nutrition & Research) March. 2025 - April. 2026 Founding Engineer Cupertino, CA

● Architected and launched the MVP for an AI-powered pet health platform, building the entire backend from scratch (FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS) to support early-access beta testing for 10,000+ users.

● Architected a streaming API layer in Python/FastAPI with async request handling, connection pooling, and graceful degradation; designed circuit breakers and idempotency keys to handle retry storms under variable traffic.

● Designed a cost-optimized inference gateway that dynamically routed requests between self-hosted vLLM (for heavy nutritional data extraction) and OpenAI/Claude APIs, reducing monthly LLM costs by 40%.

● Implemented an event-driven analytics pipeline using AWS SQS and DynamoDB to track user dietary preferences and search patterns, feeding into a personalized recommendation engine.

● Built a high-performance RAG pipeline using LlamaIndex and Qdrant to query a proprietary knowledge base of 50k+ veterinary research papers and clinical trials, achieving sub-second "time-to-first-token."

● Instrumented end-to-end observability using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana — monitoring TTFT, throughput, error rates, and routing success to enable data-driven capacity planning.

● Built a data ingestion engine(TypeScript, Playwright) to scrape, normalize, and load hundreds of thousands of records from e-commerce platforms into a structured PostgreSQL schema on AWS RDS.

● Defined the organization’s technical roadmap and engineering standards; established a high-velocity RFC (Request for Comments) process for architectural decisions

SINOTRANS (HK) LOGISTICS LIMITED. June. 2021 - March. 2025 Software Engineer Beijing, China

● Led technical design and migration of the land transport platform from a monolith to 3 Java Spring Boot microservices

(Document Entry, Settlement, Analytics); defined service boundaries, API contracts, and data ownership.

● Implemented the Saga pattern for distributed transactions across settlement services, ensuring consistency and automated rollback without two-phase commits.

● Designed an event-sourced architecture using Apache Kafka to capture and replay all state changes in the settlement pipeline, enabling full audit trails and reducing financial reconciliation errors.

● Built a real-time vessel tracking service using Cassandra for high-throughput time-series ingestion and Redis for low-latency query caching (sub-250ms P95).

● Integrated Elasticsearch for full-text search across millions of shipping documents, supporting multi-field queries for customs, billing, and compliance with sub-second response times.

● Served as Technical Lead for a cross-functional squad of 6; mentored 3 junior engineers through 50+ code reviews per month and authored the department’s first high-availability runbook.

● Automated Kubernetes deployments via Jenkins and ArgoCD (GitOps); engineered HPA policies to scale compute resources dynamically, ensuring 99.9% availability during 5x traffic surges. Apple Feb. 2020 - March. 2021

Software Engineer – AI/ML (Siri TTS) Cupertino, CA

● Implemented core features of a Speech Construction Platform (Python/Flask, PostgreSQL) that enabled the Siri TTS linguist team to manage global recording workflows and integrate with high-concurrency backend services.

● Built a distributed corpus management module with real-time audio playback and automated analytics; optimized slow database queries using Redis caching, contributing to a 35% reduction in data collection cycle times.

● Contributed to modernizing the team's deployment infrastructure by implementing Docker containerization and Kubernetes orchestration on Apple's internal cloud, helping standardize CI/CD practices across the Siri AI/ML organization.

● Collaborated with cross-functional linguist and data science teams to translate research requirements into data ingestion specifications for core TTS speech models.

TECHNICAL SKILL

Languages: Java, Python, Go, SQL, TypeScript

Frameworks & Libraries: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, FastAPI, React, LlamaIndex, vLLM Databases & Storage: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, Qdrant, MongoDB Messaging & Patterns: Apache Kafka, Event Sourcing, Saga Pattern, Microservices, RESTful APIs, gRPC Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Distributed Tracing EDUCATION

Beijing University of Posts and TelecommunicationsM.S. Computer Science Sep. 2013 - Feb 2016 Beijing University of Posts and TelecommunicationsB.S. Computer Science Sep. 2007 - May 2011

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