Backend engineer with over 18 years of experience specializing in billing systems, usage-based infrastructure, and high-scale API development. Expert in architecting payment processing systems, usage data pipelines, and control plane services that handle multiple terabytes of data daily. Proven track record transforming billing architectures and optimizing data pipelines, achieving up to 96% improvement in processing times. Well-versed in growth-based development including experimentation frameworks, A/B testing, and data-driven optimization. Seeking a role with a small, agile team where I can leverage my technical acumen to make immediate impact, with the autonomy to drive decisions and own complex systems end-to-end.
Platform backend engineer focused on infrastructure and data systems. Launched point-in-time recovery for Postgres solution, enabling customers to restore databases to any specific moment. Spearheading data warehouse cleanup initiative to address inefficiencies in current ETL processes. Working on addressing data access issues and UI inconsistencies on the frontend through a design system.
Spearheaded initiatives to enhance the customer billing experience and increase conversion rates to premium plans through growth experiments on both the frontend and backend. Helped lead a major database migration project for billing systems, implementing dual-write patterns and blue-green testing methodologies to ensure zero-downtime transition while significantly improving data structure and facilitating extensive code cleanup. Led strategic effort to unify B2B and B2C offerings across the entire product, creating a more cohesive customer experience and streamlined internal architecture. Actively mentored two engineers (one mid-level, one junior) to accelerate their technical growth and expand team capacity.
Key projects led include:
Staff platform engineer charged with scaling the control plane and core APIs. Also the primary owner and lead engineer for all billing systems and usage data pipelines. Implemented observability best practices across the engineering organization through Datadog monitoring improvements and comprehensive runbooks. Mentored four senior engineers who were subsequently promoted to Staff Engineer roles, helping build the next generation of technical leadership. Collaborated directly with the Director and VP of Engineering as well as the CFO to develop and execute strategic billing initiatives aligned with company growth and financial objectives. Effectively managed stakeholders and expectations across multiple customer-facing teams, ensuring seamless billing experiences throughout the customer journey. Core technologies are Ruby and Golang services, Kafka, Clickhouse, and MongoDB.
Key projects led include:
Responsible for exposing new platform, billing-centric APIs for the control plane and FE to consume. Also helped improved and scale billing infrastructure as customer growth accelerated especially in the enterprise space.
Founding member of the Growth Team that helped build a team capable of running sophisticated growth experiments in the product using data backends and APIs.
Key projects include:
Full-stack, remote engineer who worked on Segment's products targeting enterprise and self-serve customers. Primarily used React, GraphQL, Node.JS and Go micro-services to rewrite the RBAC Auth model, drove the launch of the Segment Functions Product, and kickstarted a new version of JavaScript SDK.
Key achievements:
Full-stack, remote engineer that worked on Librato's monitoring platform which handled over 3TB of data daily for hundreds of software teams. Built and scaled UIs and backend APIs along with various distributed systems written in Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, and Java 8.
Full-stack engineer that helped create functionality for initial version of BookShout, an ebook reading application. Optimized and scaled main APIs backed by Ruby on Rails, Scala, and MySQL
One of two QA engineers that focused building out automated testing using Selenium for one of Active's web-based SaaS products
Venn is an open source, modern, self-hosted billing platform written in Clojure. Designed to handle complex billing scenarios that are driven a common event specification that engineers can consume. Currently in semi-active development.
Scrollwork is a sidecar agent that allows teams to asses the cost risk of an AI prompt. Currently in active development.
Ruby on Rails, Golang, Distributed Systems, Kafka, ClickHouse, MongoDB, Observability, Clojure/ClojureScript, Polylith, Functional Programming, GraphQL, REST, gRPC, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, JavaScript, TypeScript, NodeJS, Relational Databases, NoSQL Databases, CI/CD pipelines, AI / LLM Tooling with Claude and ChatGPT
Strategic Planning, Technical Leadership, Mentoring, Technical Acumen, Managing Stakeholders, Results-driven Delivery, System Ownership, Cross-team Collaboration, Autonomous Execution
Bryan Mikaelian <bryan.mikaelian@gmail.com>