Senior Backend Engineer with 7+ years of experience in Python, API design, full stack development, and scalable infrastructure.
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Acted as tech lead for KYC/KYB data ingestion and processing systems; partnered cross-functionally with Compliance and Risk stakeholders to meet aggressive timelines and deliver clarity across domains
Drove alignment across engineering to reduce scope creep, saving an estimated sprint of development effort
Shadowed Ops team workflows and integrated feedback into the Case Management platform to improve usability and efficiency
Navigated the transition from legacy systems (Poetry, Zookeeper, CircleCI) to modern stacks (Nix, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions) while maintaining velocity on key deliverables
Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
Migrated CI/CD workflows from CircleCI to GitHub Actions, reducing overhead by consolidating credential setup and replacing legacy codegen with a shared proto library
Replaced outdated Lambda + API Gateway logging flow by designing and deploying an Envoy-based logging filter with traffic routing via internal load balancer
Service Development & System Design
Developed and deployed the first endpoint for the Case Management service in under four weeks, integrating with Unit21 via request/response lifecycle handling
Built foundational infrastructure using SQLAlchemy models, Alembic migrations, protobuf contracts, and endpoint definitions
Led iterative design reviews for proxy service consolidation, delivering highly visual and well-structured architecture diagrams to facilitate team understanding during periods of limited stakeholder availability
Developer Experience & Documentation
Updated Datadog monitors, runbooks, and retro templates to ensure accuracy, reproducibility, and ease of use
Introduced and maintained story-based local development environments to reduce ramp-up time for engineers and minimize team-wide context switching
Regularly maintained on-call playbooks and incident response logs, addressing DMS failures and Airbyte/Airflow data pipeline issues
Spearheaded the end-to-end development of a customizable notifications system, enabling automated email alerts based on user-defined triggers—resulting in improved customer engagement and faster visibility into key metrics.
Engineered a flexible alerting framework to support projected stockouts, rate-of-sale anomalies, and additional critical alerts.
Designed and implemented a Knock workflow to batch and trigger daily email notifications when alert conditions are met.
Backfilled and enriched alert staging data by linking merchant country IDs to customer subscriptions, ensuring accurate targeting.
Led the design and launch of account relationships functionality, empowering parent accounts to manage child accounts and simplifying administration for enterprise clients.
Built internal-facing services and APIs enabling agency clients to efficiently manage large account hierarchies.
Rolled out a dedicated internal API instance for account endpoints, reducing load on the public API and significantly improving system performance.
Collaborated with DevOps to provision infrastructure using Ingress Terraform, configure Convox, and integrate with Argo Workflows.
Coordinated with internal stakeholders to reroute traffic from the public API to the new internal route, enhancing stability and performance.
Instrumented Datadog dashboards to monitor usage and ensure smooth adoption of the new internal API path.
Financial Reporting Automation & Accounting Tools
Led design and implementation of an API-driven worker to automate month-end report generation for the accounting team, eliminating hours of idle time spent waiting on 10+ reports.
Built a message-driven worker leveraging internal queues with retry mechanisms to handle failures and delayed report generation reliably.
Built a bulk expense upload API for insurance and property taxes, eliminating repetitive manual entry and significantly improving accounting team efficiency.
Enhanced reporting accuracy by supporting actual-value fields and integrating them into the servicing tape report.
Created Stripe fee reports for a cash flow management system to track the full payment lifecycle across platform and operating accounts.
Automated calculation of internal fund transfers, reducing manual accounting overhead.
Added user-facing UI option to download fee reports by line item for greater transparency and flexibility.
Transaction Categorization & Payments
Revamped transaction categorization UI to support multi-property selection and specific amount allocation.
Validated allocations against total transaction amounts and enabled uncategorization workflows with confirmation dialogs.
Enhanced GraphQL queries and mutations to support advanced categorization logic.
Developed payloads for bank reversal events and modified backend validation logic to account for these scenarios within the payments framework.
UI Modernization & Reporting Enhancements
Migrated legacy JSX-based modal and form components to modern TSX functional components; added robust monetary validation logic.
Updated and aligned UI with internal Core design system for consistency and maintainability.
Improved rent run reporting by capturing card transactions and refactoring core helpers.
Built runner scripts to test internal reports, improving confidence in reporting outputs and enabling repeatable validations.
Operationalizing Computer Vision for Real Estate – Image Feature Extraction Pipeline
Led the end-to-end engineering effort to operationalize Zillow’s first Computer Vision model, transforming raw home photos into high-quality labels for kitchen/bathroom finishes and appliance colors—key inputs for pricing analysts and AVMs (Automated Valuation Models).
Enhanced pricing precision for Zillow Offers by increasing both automated and human-assisted valuation accuracy.
Labeled ~2 million properties with >85% agreement to analyst-reviewed ground truth, significantly scaling Zillow’s home intelligence.
Boosted analyst efficiency by automating visual assessments of home interiors, reducing manual review time.
Spearheaded the design, development, and deployment of the full engineering pipeline for image feature extraction.
Defined the data contract and schema for image label storage, ensuring consistency and downstream usability.
Partnered with AI Platform to cache quality labels in Redis, enabling low-latency access during valuation workflows.
Configured service-level AWS IAM roles for secure and reliable S3 read/write access.
Facilitated sprint ceremonies and cross-team collaboration, increasing engagement and improving onboarding velocity.
Technologies: Python, AWS S3, Redis, IAM, Computer Vision
Deprecating Monolithic Library – Modernizing Human-Supported Valuation Models
Led the successful deprecation of a legacy monolithic library used in Zillow’s human-supported valuation models, improving system modularity, code quality, and long-term maintainability.
Eliminated legacy dependencies, reducing technical debt and enabling faster, more reliable development across model teams.
Improved test coverage and reliability by migrating critical functions into modular services and writing comprehensive unit tests.
Streamlined codebase by consolidating functionality into shared libraries, reducing duplication and increasing reuse.
Migrated essential code from the deprecated monolith into active projects, ensuring functionality parity and minimal disruption.
Resolved key bugs caused by inconsistent column name suffixes, and implemented configurable overrides to enhance UI flexibility.
Removed experimental and unused classes, reducing clutter and improving code maintainability.
Fixed version conflicts by updating outdated dependency pins and aligning them across projects.
Education
California State University Channel Islands