# Kyle Fahey > Backend Architecture Leader | Distributed Systems Engineer | Go & Node.js Expert | Open Source Contributor Location: Phoenix, Arizona, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kylefahey For over 8 years, I've architected scalable backend systems and led distributed engineering teams while setting technical standards. I've designed high-performance solutions including GraphQL federation, pub/sub systems for real-time NHL updates, ABAC authentication frameworks, and Elasticsearch implementations that now power search for 2M+ monthly visitors. My technical journey began as a self-taught programmer at 13, now complemented by formal computer science education. I've transformed unstable platforms experiencing 20+ daily crashes into reliable systems and delivered mission-critical solutions for both Y Combinator startups and Fortune 500 enterprises including AbbVie and OC Sports & Entertainment. Beyond my professional work, I contribute to open-source projects like enhancing Tidbyt's Pixlet with iCalendar support and developing YAKE, a Rust-based keyword extractor with 11,000+ downloads across crates.io and NPM for the WASM version. I combine architectural vision with hands-on implementation, delivering systems that scale reliably while providing exceptional business value. ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Engineer @ Litehouse Jan 2024 – Present | Phoenix, Arizona, United States Litehouse, a spin-off from OC Sports + Entertainment develops premier smart district and campus management systems. Five engineers from thirty-three were chosen to continue the legacy of Litehouse from the trial grounds of ocV!BE and the Honda Center in Anaheim, CA and turn the product into a commercial offering for other smart districts and campuses. - Worked closely with VP of Product to refine functionality and designs - Led SOC2 research and implementation across domains - Led home-rolled to Auth0 migration - Did gap analysis on external consultants work across our Federated Data Platform and create design and implementation docs for the consultants to execute - Developed RAG pipelines with Vector and Semantic Search and OpenAI's LLM (ChatGPT) with Python in Azure Synapse and Typescript (Node.js) designed to give valid GraphQL queries based on user questions about data. E.g. How many tickets were sold last game? - Developed data normalization, transformation and indexing pipelines in Azure Synapse for running on Spark clusters - Implemented Lucene queries for advanced user search - Planned and executed schema changes to transform management system from single organization and single application to multi-tenant and multi-application implementing a revised ERD with 40+ relations - Implemented Mapbox with polygons, heatmaps, directional activity logs, custom map pins with MUI icons and more for human analytics in React (Next.js). - Implemented GeoJSON features in MongoDB with Nest.JS and Mongoose - Built a low-level proxy server in Go to implement our system-wide ABAC in front of Streamlit a platform for developing with LLMs - Fixed various Kubernetes, ACR, and AKS related issues including under-provisioning of services, secrets issues, improper config and more - Served as SME for backend and Github Actions based CI/CD pipeline unblocking other engineers as needed ### Staff Software Engineer @ OC Sports + Entertainment Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Chicago, Illinois, United States OC Sports + Entertainment is owned by the NHL Anaheim Ducks. They are building a first-of-its-kind, technology-driven district in the middle of Orange County, CA. OC Sports + Entertainment uses Node.JS with TypeScript and NestJS, AMQP, MongoDB, Kubernetes, Docker, on Azure for the backend and React with NextJS on the frontend. - Led a small team of 3 engineers to develop custom KPI dashboard for Chief Innovation Officer & shipped in a month - Rapidly prototyped a NestJS solution to stand-in for an experimental framework that I determined was not production ready and trained 30+ engineers across India and the US on the new framework - Owned the backend TypeScript & NestJS codebase, reviewing and merging over 1000 PRs, setting the standard for code quality - Created training materials and held organization wide meetings to train and upskill team members across the US and India on various topics such as TypeScript, NestJS, better unit testing and ProtoBuf - Architected authn and authz with ABAC, JWT refresh and access tokens and integrated with third parties such as TicketMaster - Spearheaded adoption of DataDog for enhanced observability and GitHub Actions for CI/CD - Authored our organizational code style guide for TypeScript on the backend - Worked with the creator of the JavaScript federated microservices framework (Aegis) to come up with a roadmap to improve performance and the developer experience - Collaborated with PwC consultants to design and deploy scalable federated data platform built with GraphQL and integrate with our backend services - Engineered pub/sub system for real-time NHL game updates supported by Azure Event Hub working through the challenges of live sports scoring data integrity issues and real-time updates ultimately delivering project on time - Implemented Redis caching solution for endpoints affected by events at the Honda Center reducing backend load ### Senior Software Engineer @ Allergan Data Labs Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | Remote Allergan Data Labs is a group within AbbVie which is one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. They are building the industry's first booking and rewards platform for cosmetic treatment providers such as those who offer Botox. ADL's stack is server-rendered React on the front-end with serverless Node and Go on the backend backed by a large federated GQL Schema. Database technologies we use are Postgres, Snowflake, and DynamoDB. - Introduced ElasticSearch to the organization and built the first search microservice in NestJS and TypeScript now used as the primary search on a website with over 2,000,000 monthly visitors (alle.com) - Introduced Go, Postgres, gRPC and GraphQL based microservice that served as the source of truth for our most important schema (Provider). This microservice integrated with PostGIS for geolocation, SendGrid via SQS and SNS for transactional emails, image upload via Signed URL Upload to Amazon S3 and more. The service was a large addition to the organization's already large federated graph - Helped found the GraphQL Council after pointing out a need for a proper schema review with written standards and documentation after creating the first microservice since MVP. The GraphQL committee sets GraphQL standards for the organization and reviews all GraphQL changes across a federated schema with over 20 unique microservices contributing to the graph - Created Miro boards, Medium articles and other training materials and presented in front of 60+ engineers to teach, train and evangelize using Go with the overall goal of improving developer experience and reducing bugs shipped - Worked very closely with product to hash out requirements and amend current requirements educating product on the capabilities of our stack which includes ElasticSearch - Interviewed candidates for culture and technical knowledge ### Special Advisor to CTO @ Pangea.app Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Remote Pangea is a Y Combinator graduate (Winter '21) in the process of raising their Series A with a GMV of over $1M. They are a freelancing community with the goal of matching companies with university talent. Pangea's stack is React on the front-end with (TypeScript) Koa, Rethink, RabbitMQ, Postgres, and ElasticSearch on the backend. Partnered with non-technical founding CTO to transform an unstable platform experiencing 20+ daily crashes into a reliable system. Educated leadership on architectural best practices while implementing critical stability improvements. Created a collaborative learning environment where engineering decisions were paired with knowledge transfer, enabling the team to understand and maintain the improvements. Established performance monitoring and proper error handling, resulting in significantly reduced latency, fewer deployed bugs, and enhanced user experience - Mentored non-technical founding CTO and other engineers on application design, architecture, infrastructure, and best practices in JavaScript - Planned and lead the initiative to convert WebSockets used semi-RESTfully to HTTP REST which removed memory leaks in the NodeJS application and significantly improved latencies improving the user experience - Planned and lead the initiative to take long-running non-critical third-party API calls out of our controllers and onto queues further improving latencies and user experience - Planned and lead the initiative converting deprecated and unsupported RethinkDB to Postgres which solved their periodic crashing issue - Convinced CTO and team to convert to Typescript and lead implementation which drastically reduced bugs shipped with the team - Implemented backend New Relic tracing and Sentry alerts to provide performance and error insights - Implemented ES Lint with the AirBnB style guide, refactored codebase accordingly and held meetings to train on ESLint and the Airbnb Style Guide which further reduced bugs shipped ### Senior Software Engineer @ Hoopla Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Remote Hoopla is the gamification solution for sales teams. They help facilitate bigger sales and better culture by enabling your sales teams to enter contests, battles, races while allowing "fans" to cheer the sales team on. Hoopla's stack is Angular 1. x, along with Ruby on Rails microservices with RabbitMQ and Postgres on the backend. - Planned, designed, and led the creation of a new Ruby on Rails microservice to authenticate and publish notifications to Microsoft Teams - Lead the creation of a new RBAC user role called 'fan' across 13 microservices which allowed non-sales players to celebrate wins with the sales teams along with birthdays and anniversaries - Implemented transactional emails using a pub/sub architecture and SendGrid, hand-coded templates in RBS, HTML and CSS following the design given to us by the UX designer ### Software Engineer @ The Thought & Expression Co. Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | Remote The Thought & Expression Co. is a premier digital media agency that owns both Thought Catalog and Quote Catalog with millions of monthly visitors along with offering writing and advertising-based consulting services. Quote Catalog was built with server-rendered React with a PHP (Laravel) backend which was backed by MySQL, Redis caching, and ElasticSearch. Thought Catalog had an ecosystem of React and Node (Koa) which was backed by MongoDB. - In charge of over 300 deployments to production - Took business goals and worked with the Director of Innovation to turn them into products - Owned 4 codebases which included 2 Slackbots and 2 APIs, maintained another 3 with the team - Maintained substantial growth through the release of new features and ensuring stability (Revenue increased 300% while increasing uptime and performance in my first year) AWS - Planned and lead our AWS cost-cutting measure by lowering our classes of EC2 instances without downtime - Built out advanced logging and monitoring with CloudWatch and Route53 health checks - Reindexed MySQL on RDS to bring down CPU usage to lower the instance class and reduce costs - Migrated critical endpoints to Lambda PHP - Learned PHP and started shipping features in Laravel within two weeks - Lead initiative to speed up our Laravel backed via profiling our controllers; rewrote problem libraries - Fixed data integrity issues in a set of MySQL tables set up as a hierarchal tree and wrote backfill scripts - Built out a custom ElasticSearch query builder on the backend and implemented reverse searching - Built recommendation engine in ElasticSearch and PHP for rec'd quotes Node - Built a Slackbot with an API to streamline our article producers' workflow - Designed and built a disaster recovery system for our non-managed MongoDB database - Fixed memory leaks via leak monitoring and core dumps - Built out a SaaS-like model writing service with monthly recurring payments (Stripe for CCs and Authorize.net for ACH) ### Independent Consultant @ LabRecruit Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Remote Based in London, LabRecruit was a bespoke recruiting agency focused on functional programming. Steve, the owner of LabRecruit approached me to help him build an automated pipeline to automatically download candidate data from GitHub and LinkedIn and make searchable via ElasticSearch. Python was used for our version one but later rewritten in Node.JS due to better domain specific library availability. - Researched and developed ways to use LinkedIn's internal API along with a way to turn an email address into a profile URL - Built a pipeline that would first gather emails using the Github API and then feed them into a queue which then verified their email based on regex, MX record domain verification, and finally, SMTP interrogation used a cookie from programmatically logging into a LinkedIn Premium account to ping a URL used in the Sales Navigator widget to turn that email into a profile urn which was used to programmatically scrape their job and education history and save to ElasticSearch - Used Python, TypeScript and NodeJS with Koa and MongoDB Ultimately instead of using the pipeline for his business, due to the product having extreme utility, Steve sold the product to recruiting agencies. ### Fullstack Javascript Developer (Contract) @ Elexa Consumer Products Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Bannockburn, Illinois Elexa Consumer Products is a manufacturer of home automation sensors such as a device that shuts off your water main in the event of flooding or an earthquake as well as white label manufacturing for Wink a similar brand owned by will.i.am from the pop group The Black Eyed Peas. Elexa Consumer products used Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, VueJS, React, MongoDB and AWS -Designed and built a best in class eCommerce checkout experience that has been dubbed by our customers as "the easiest checkout ever." - Received unsolicited praise from home automation industry leaders for how beautiful our website was - Designed and built a custom e-commerce solution backed by a headless CMS and a Vue cart - Built a beautiful marketing website in React for the Guardian Leak Detector - Built an Ruby on Rails inventory management and payment gateway (Authorize.net) solution for our Vue based cart ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science Western Governors University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kylecrfahey --- Source: https://flows.cv/kylefahey JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kylefahey/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22