Sam Whitfield
Senior Software Engineer | Backend Systems, Distributed Services and Platform Reliability
Summary
Backend engineer with nine years building and running services in TypeScript, Go and Python. Owns systems end to end, from design docs through on-call, and mentors engineers on code quality and testing. Known for making slow, fragile systems faster and easier to change.
Skills
TypeScript and Node.js · Go · Python · PostgreSQL · Message queues · AWS · Docker and Kubernetes · Observability and on-call · System design
Experience
- Led the redesign of the billing service into three smaller services, cutting p95 response time from 900 ms to about 300 ms.
- Introduced contract tests and a staging data pipeline that reduced billing-related incidents by roughly 40% over a year.
- Wrote design docs for four cross-team projects and ran reviews with product, data and support leads.
- Mentored five engineers, two of whom were promoted to senior during that time.
- Built an order event queue in Go that handled peak holiday traffic with no checkout outages for two seasons.
- Moved search indexing to a scheduled job, lowering database load during business hours by about a quarter.
- Added structured logging and dashboards that cut average time to find the cause of an incident in half.
- Shipped features for 12 client web apps in JavaScript and Python.
- Set up automated tests and continuous integration for the agency's shared component library.
- Supported client launches, handling fixes and handoff notes for in-house teams.
Certifications
- AWS Certified Developer, Associate
Education
- B.S. Computer Science, state university