Open to opportunities

Chenkai Liu

@chenkailiu

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Staff software engineer specializing in scalable AI systems, distributed architectures, and cloud-native platforms.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I am seeking roles building scalable AI and distributed systems at companies that prioritize observability, security, operational excellence, and measurable business impact.

I am a Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in architecting scalable AI-powered systems, distributed services, and cloud-native infrastructure. I design and ship high-throughput inference platforms, secure multi-tenant APIs, and responsive management consoles that improve operational visibility and reliability.

At Amazon I led the development of an internal LLM-powered AI agent and engineered SageMaker/EKS inference services processing millions of monthly requests, cutting support resolution time and delivering multi-million dollar annual savings. Previously at Stripe and Toptal I built PCI-compliant payment APIs, event-driven financial orchestration, and multi-tenant SaaS platforms that achieved high availability and strong compliance.

I mentor engineers in systems design and operational excellence, and I prioritize observability, resilient architecture, and cost-efficient cloud operations to drive measurable business impact.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Staff Software Engineer

Current

Amazon

Oct 2021 - Present (4 years 8 months)

Architected and launched internal LLM-powered AI agent and scalable inference services, reducing support resolution time by 42% and saving $3.2M annually while processing 25M+ monthly AI requests.

Python Go Sagemaker Kubernetes DynamoDB OpenTelemetry React

Senior Software Engineer

Stripe

Nov 2017 - Oct 2021 (3 years 11 months)

Architected PCI-DSS compliant payment processing APIs and event-driven financial orchestration handling 200M+ daily API calls, improving availability to 99.99% and lifting authorization success by 24%.

Ruby on Rails Java PostgreSQL Kafka Redis Kubernetes Prometheus GraphQL React Distributed Systems

Software Engineer

Toptal

Feb 2014 - Nov 2017 (3 years 9 months)

Architected multi-tenant fintech and SaaS platforms using microservices and DDD, deployed cloud-native infrastructure on AWS, and accelerated release cycles by 30% via CI/CD and containerization.

React PostgreSQL RabbitMQ Docker AWS Jenkins CI CD Microservices