Senior Backend Engineer for Scalable AI Systems

Jon Lee

Staff Software Engineer

Frisco, TX, 857-***-****, *********@*******.***, Linkedin, Github Summary

Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years building high-scale backend systems and AI-powered infrastructure. At Spotify, I've owned end-to-end delivery of real-time event pipelines processing 1 trillion + events/day, LLM/RAG services powering personalized audio experiences, and the observability layer keeping it all visible. I gravitate toward hard infrastructure problems - the kind where scale, reliability, and latency all have to be solved at once. Experience

Spotify Staff Software Engineer Nov 2019 - current Remote Technologies: Java/Scala, Python/FastAPI, Go/Gin, React/D3.js, RAG/LLM, GCP(Pub/Sub, GKE, Dataflow, BigQuery), gRPC/RESTful APIs, OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Docker/Kubernetes, Flyte/Scio, Jest/Playwright/Pytest

● Spearheaded the design and development of Spotify's Event Delivery Infrastructure (EDI) - a tenant-isolated pipeline processing 1T+ user events/day across 1,800+ GCP Pub/Sub topics. Wrote core components in Scala/Java with Flyte + Scio (Beam) for orchestration, and designed auto-schema provisioning so teams could onboard without ops involvement - feeding real-time data into AI DJ personalization.

● Shipped Spotify's Studio AI Assistant - a RAG-backed LLM service in Python/FastAPI that pulls from listening history, calendar, and music catalog to generate personalized podcasts, briefings, and remixes on demand. Session time lifted ~31% after rollout.

● Wrote Go microservices with gRPC + Kubernetes for real-time event routing and personalization - cut p99 latency by ~43% and scaled to handle the 1T+/day event volume feeding AI DJ and recommendations.

● Instrumented Spotify's microservices with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and VictoriaMetrics - shipping Grafana dashboards and alerts that gave teams real-time visibility into throughput, latency, and errors. Avg MTTR dropped from ~2hr to under 50min.

● Owned Spotify's internal pipeline health dashboard in React + D3.js - visualizing live ingestion metrics, sync status, and error rates across teams. Engineers went from hunting Slack threads for pipeline issues to spotting anomalies directly in the UI.

● Managed GCP infrastructure (GKE, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery) for Spotify's backend - automated failover handling, tuned Cloud Monitoring alerts, and cut infra costs ~18% by rightsizing underutilized Dataflow jobs.

● Containerized Honk (AI agent) and EDI (data ingestion) services with Docker + Kubernetes

(GKE), tuning autoscaling policies and resource quotas that cut infra spend ~20% while keeping throughput stable under peak AI DJ load.

● Drove test coverage across AI DJ, Studio Assistant, and EDI pipelines using Jest, Playwright, and Pytest - caught cross-service contract breaks early and brought critical production bugs down from ~20/month to under 5 after rollout.

● Implement and manage CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions

● Collaborated with cross-functional teams(project managers, designers, and data scientist) and mentor 3 engineers on system design, best practices, and cross service integration. Think Finance Software Engineer Dec 2015 - Oct 2019 Irving, TX Technologies: PHP/Laravel, RESTful APIs, AWS(EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ElastiCache), SQS/SNS

● Developed PHP backend services and RESTful APIs for Cortex - handling loan origination, underwriting, and servicing for installment loans and lines of credit at scale.

● Provisioned and maintained AWS infrastructure (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ElastiCache) with auto-scaling for peak lending load - platform sustained $4B+ in originations at 99.9% uptime.

● Wired the PHP layer into SQS, SNS, and CloudWatch to feed real-time decisions through iQ Decision Engine - cut underwriting latency from ~380ms to ~210ms while staying FCRA-compliant.

● Migrated legacy PHP components to AWS microservices, trimming infra costs by ~28% and meaningfully improving reliability for partner lenders. Skills

● Languages: Java, Scala, Python, Go, PHP, JavaScript/TypeScript

● Frameworks & Libraries: FastAPI, Gin, React, D3.js, Laravel, Scio (Apache Beam), Next.js, Node.js, Express

● AI & ML: LLMs, RAG Pipelines, Vector Search, Real-time Personalization, AI Agent Systems

● Data & Streaming: GCP Pub/Sub, Apache Dataflow, BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, Flyte

● Infrastructure & Cloud: GCP (GKE, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Run), AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, ElastiCache), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform

● Messaging & Integration: gRPC, RESTful APIs, SQS, SNS, CloudWatch

● Observability & Testing: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Jest, Playwright, Pytest

● Databases: BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Redis (ElastiCache), MongoDB

● Practices: Distributed Systems Design, Microservices Architecture, Event-Driven Architecture, System Design, Technical Mentorship

EducationJon

The University of Texas at Austin Bachelor’s, Electrical and Computer Engineering 2011 - 2015

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