Designing and building cloud-native, event-driven backend systems on AWS to power music metadata ingestion and distribution at scale.

Key contributions:

• Architected a scalable DDEX ingestion platform using EventBridge, Kinesis, Step Functions, and Lambda, processing 10M+ daily metadata records with near-real-time reliability.

• Led the design and implementation of S3Porter — a distributed Fargate-based service that migrated 100TB+ of media assets from on-prem to S3 with 5x faster transfer speeds.

• Introduced distributed tracing with Datadog across microservices, reducing pipeline errors by 80% and enabling rapid bottleneck resolution.

• Built a version-agnostic DDEX parser that eliminated legacy version-specific code debt.

• Optimized compute allocation between Lambda and containers, achieving 3x higher throughput and 30% lower monthly AWS costs.

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pair programming and in-depth code reviews to maintain high architectural and code quality standards.

Owned and evolved critical backend services handling catalog metadata for artists, albums, and tracks.

Highlights:

• Led development of Kafka-backed microservices processing 50M+ catalog events daily, ensuring 100% accuracy and zero-downtime deployments for time-sensitive releases.

• Improved team velocity by introducing multithreading and batch processing patterns in Python/Django services, cutting average release cycles by 30%.

• Maintained high-availability REST APIs and Content State services that control metadata visibility across search, recommendations, and playback systems serving millions of users.

Contributed to backend, full-stack, and media processing systems supporting podcast analytics, content distribution, and social audio platforms. Joined initially as a contractor in 2016 and converted to full-time in 2020.

Key projects and impact:

• Led frontend architecture for a real-time React/Apollo podcast analytics dashboard, delivering live listener engagement metrics to stakeholders and content teams.

• Designed and built a GraphQL API backend (Flask + PostgreSQL) that reduced data over-fetching by 40% and improved dashboard response times from ~5 seconds to under 500ms for high-traffic queries.

• Developed event-driven media processing pipelines using AWS Lambda, SQS, and FFmpeg, enabling scalable short-form audio distribution and HLS streaming compatibility across platforms.

• Built and owned SXM Publish — a platform for distributing short-form audio clips to social channels, driving 100,000+ subscriber conversions through viral content sharing.

Developed backend applications in Python/Django for secure medical device data integration and analysis