Gordon Towne

I am a Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years designing, building, and scaling high-availability distributed systems for global consumer platforms. I focus on backend architecture, large-scale data pipelines, and AI-driven personalization that support hundreds of millions of users.

At Spotify I led backend architecture for AI-driven personalization, owned batch and streaming data pipelines with Kafka, Scio/Spark, and GCP, and built infrastructure with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker to enable zero-downtime deployments. I also defined boundaries between ML/AI services and experimentation pipelines to accelerate model iteration and improve A/B test reliability.

Previously at Amazon I engineered latency-sensitive backend services for a voice product, optimized real-time processing pipelines to reduce end-to-end latency, and led operational excellence initiatives to improve uptime. At UnitedHealth I led a Provider Portal modernization, built secure, component-driven frontends, and introduced CI/CD and automated testing practices.

I am a strong collaborator and technical leader who mentors engineers, sets standards for reliability and observability, and delivers measurable business impact through scalable, production-ready solutions.