Production backend services built around clear API contracts, reliability, and debuggability.
Backend and Real-Time Systems Engineer
Core Focus
Reliability under real conditions
Designing systems that remain stable when requests race, data arrives out of order, and components fail under load.
Latency and performance
Optimizing for tail latency and throughput so systems stay responsive during peak traffic and real-time workloads.
Observability and debugging
Instrumenting systems with metrics, logs, and traces to understand behavior in production and resolve issues at the root cause.
Backend systems under real-world constraints
Using embedded systems experience as a supporting differentiator to design backend platforms that remain stable with noisy inputs and unpredictable conditions.
About
Backend systems that stay predictable in production.
Build Focus
Query tuning, schema design, caching strategy, and consistency patterns for production workloads.
Queue-driven workflows and event-based coordination designed to remain resilient under failure.
Metrics-first debugging, instrumentation, deployment, and incident workflows for production systems.
Working Approach
- Design for concurrency, failure, and recovery
- Instrument before tuning or scaling
- Use metrics and traces to isolate bottlenecks
- Keep incident debugging fast and repeatable
Operational Focus
Tail latency, retries, stale state, queueing, data ordering, and the architectural choices that shape reliability and debuggability at scale.
Flagship Project
Systems built to handle scale, coordination, and real-world failure.
Focused on distributed systems, real-time pipelines, and production-grade reliability.
Global Distributed Rate Limiter
Global rate-limiting service for stateless systems in horizontally scaled environments.
- Sustains ~12K req/sec at ~12ms p95 with stateless Go services behind Envoy.
- Uses Redis Cluster and atomic Lua scripts to keep limiting correct under concurrency.
- Adds fault-tolerant request handling with Prometheus and Grafana observability.
ShopCloud E-Commerce Platform (Microservices + Distributed Coordination)
Cloud-native commerce backend with clear service boundaries and consistency controls.
- Designed 7 microservices on Lambda and ECS with 12 DynamoDB tables and explicit API contracts.
- Implemented Saga orchestration, compensation logic, idempotency, and atomic inventory reservations.
- Used SQS, EventBridge, and observability instrumentation to validate reliability under failures.
Secure SQL Execution Platform
Backend platform for safe SQL execution with isolation, validation, and structured responses.
- Runs untrusted SQL in isolated MySQL sandboxes to protect shared infrastructure.
- Built Django API flows for submission, execution state, and result delivery under load.
- Applies validation, guardrails, fallback logic, and observability for reliable outputs.
Experience
Production systems where behavior mattered.
Experience includes systems where latency, throughput, and reliability were measurable, and improving them was part of the job.
Built backend APIs and telemetry pipelines that moved real-time device data through ingestion, PostgreSQL, and dashboards with strong observability.
- Designed backend API and ingestion paths that moved real-time telemetry from devices into backend services and persisted it reliably for downstream dashboard reads.
- Optimized PostgreSQL indexes, query plans, and write patterns on high-volume datasets to improve p95 latency, throughput, and query stability.
- Improved dashboard performance by reducing API and database bottlenecks so telemetry updates reached users faster and with better consistency.
- Instrumented the end-to-end data flow with metrics and logs across device, API, and UI boundaries to make production debugging and root-cause analysis faster.
Built authentication and reliability improvements for a production system with daily user traffic.
- Worked on backend authentication and API reliability for a production system serving daily user traffic.
- Built secure authentication flows with stronger session handling, helping reduce recurring incidents and improve operational stability.
- Implemented authorization logic and access-control rules that strengthened security while keeping the system maintainable.
- Contributed to a more reliable backend by improving how authentication, session state, and incident response were handled in production.
Focused on reliability, compliance, and risk mitigation for safety-critical infrastructure.
- Worked on reliability, compliance, and risk mitigation for safety-critical infrastructure systems where failure analysis and corrective action were central to engineering decisions.
- Conducted investigations into system failures, identified root causes, and developed corrective actions to reduce repeat issues and improve operational reliability.
- Produced technical reports and engineering documentation that translated complex findings into clear actions for clients, leadership, and regulatory stakeholders.
- Built a strong foundation in structured problem solving, reliability thinking, and communicating technical risk in high-consequence environments.
Designed electro-mechanical systems for automated equipment with a focus on precision and manufacturability.
- Designed electro-mechanical systems for automated industrial equipment in an environment where precision, manufacturability, and deployment readiness all mattered.
- Improved system performance through iterative design, structural analysis, and optimization under real-world engineering constraints.
- Worked closely with controls and manufacturing teams to ensure designs could be integrated, built, and deployed effectively.
- Strengthened full-system thinking, cross-functional execution, and practical engineering tradeoff judgment.
Led machine design and project delivery across industrial machinery and fabrication projects.
- Led engineering design and project execution across industrial machinery and fabrication projects, balancing technical requirements with delivery constraints.
- Directed prototype and machine design from concept to production readiness with a focus on feasibility, manufacturability, and execution.
- Managed stakeholder discussions, vendor coordination, and project workflows across multiple concurrent efforts.
- Built early experience in ownership, coordination, and moving complex systems from design into real-world implementation.
Supporting Systems Projects
Selected technical projects that support the backend systems story.
These projects reinforce the backend systems focus through real-time integration and debugging.
Focused on real-time behavior, system coordination, and reliability in applied settings.
Robotics
Warehouse Delivery Robot
- Built a ROS2 pipeline with task orchestration and behavior-tree control.
- Added rosbag2 logging and diagnostics to replay failures and speed debugging.
Witmotion IMU Integration
- Built a Zephyr RTOS IMU pipeline at 20-100 Hz for continuous streaming.
- Added a fault-tolerant binary parser for misaligned packets and stream corruption.
Applied AI Systems
CUDA Traffic Analytics Pipeline
- Built baseline and advanced lane paths with perspective warp, color masks, temporal tracking, and optional YOLOv8 vehicle detection.
- Validated the CUDA lane path on an RTX 3080 Ti, reaching about 96.5 FPS and a 2.69x speedup on 1080p footage.
Credit Card Fraud Detection
- Built a reproducible inference and evaluation workflow for class imbalance and data drift.
- Validated SMOTE and class-weighting with instrumentation and repeatable experiments.
RL Robot Navigation Live Dashboard
- Built a live telemetry dashboard for navigation experiments with state and event tracking.
- Kept navigation behavior observable in production-like runs for faster debugging.
Contact
Get in touch
Email
yaochong.chow.20@gmail.com
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/charles-chow-yc
GitHub
github.com/yaochongchow
Location
Currently based in San Jose, CA. Open to relocation.