Chad Drew

I’m a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience building large-scale consumer and developer platforms across TikTok and Shopify. I specialize in high-throughput distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, and AI-driven product features used by millions of users.

At TikTok, I directed a personalized recommendation ranking service using Go, Python, gRPC, and Redis—delivering billions of daily recommendations with millisecond-level latency and increasing average watch time by 12%. I integrated ML ranking models into real-time pipelines with Go, Kubernetes, Kafka, and feature stores, improving recommendation accuracy and boosting engagement by 9%.

I also built a full-stack AIGC workflow platform with Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, and PostgreSQL, enabling teams to visually compose LLM, vision, and diffusion inference pipelines. To support product teams end-to-end, I created a graph-based workflow editor with React, TypeScript, Redux, and D3 for designing, visualizing, and monitoring AI content pipelines with real-time execution insights.

Across both companies, I’ve focused on measurable impact: engineering experiment evaluation ETL pipelines with Python and PySpark (accelerating validation cycles by 50%), strengthening observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana (reducing incident detection/resolution time by 43%), and mentoring engineers on experimentation-driven development. Earlier at Shopify, I led high-volume platform work across React/TypeScript and Ruby on Rails, improving performance, reducing update time by 33%, and raising CSAT by 10% through AI-powered recommendations.