About
James Chen
I build systems that scale — from zero to millions of users.
Senior Software Engineer with 7 years building distributed systems at scale. Previously at Stripe and Cloudflare. I specialise in backend infrastructure, developer tooling, and performance optimisation. Currently open to senior IC and staff engineering roles.
Tech Stack
Languages
GoRustTypeScriptPython
Infrastructure
KubernetesAWSDockerTerraform
Databases
PostgreSQLRedisClickHouse
Systems
gRPCKafkaWebSockets
Projects
Payment Processing Engine
Reduced p99 latency by 60% and processed $2.3B in transactions during the 2023 Black Friday peak with zero downtime.
Stripe needed to handle 10x payment volume during peak events without increasing latency. Re-architected the core processing pipeline using Go, introducing async job queues and intelligent retry logic with exponential backoff.
GoPostgreSQLRedisKafka
Edge Cache Invalidation System
Reduced cache invalidation time from 200ms to 8ms globally, serving 500B+ requests per month.
Cloudflare cache invalidation was causing 200ms+ delays for time-sensitive content updates. Built a distributed invalidation system using consistent hashing across 200+ edge nodes with sub-10ms propagation.
RustRedisgRPC
Internal Developer CLI
Reduced new service setup from 45 minutes to 4 minutes. Adopted by 200+ engineers within 3 months.
Engineers at Stripe spent 45 minutes average on environment setup per new service. Built a CLI tool that scaffolds new services with full CI/CD, monitoring, and documentation in one command.
TypeScriptGoDocker
Experience
Senior Software Engineer — Payments Infrastructure
Stripe
2021 – 2024
- ▸Led re-architecture of payment processing pipeline handling $50B+ annually
- ▸Mentored 6 junior engineers, 4 of whom were promoted to senior within 18 months
- ▸Reduced infrastructure costs by 30% through query optimisation and caching strategy
Software Engineer — Edge Infrastructure
Cloudflare
2018 – 2021
- ▸Built cache invalidation system serving 500B+ requests per month
- ▸Contributed to open-source Rust networking libraries with 12k+ GitHub stars
- ▸On-call rotation lead for global edge network with 99.99% uptime SLA
Open Source
All projects, experiments, and open source contributions live on GitHub.
View GitHub →Contact
Get in touch →