Open to opportunities

Gordon Towne

@gordontowne

Message

Staff Software Engineer specializing in scalable backend systems and AI personalization.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek senior engineering roles building scalable backend and ML-facing systems, with strong emphasis on reliability, mentorship, and measurable product impact in collaborative, growth-oriented teams.

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.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Staff Software Engineer

Current

Spotify

Mar 2024 - Present (2 years 3 months)

Led backend architecture for AI-driven personalization powering generative playlist expansion for 600M MAUs; reduced model iteration time and improved A/B test reliability while mentoring engineers and increasing deployment frequency from weekly to daily with zero downtime.

Java Scala Kafka GCP Kubernetes Terraform Prometheus Observability

Senior Backend Engineer

Spotify

Apr 2020 - Mar 2024 (3 years 11 months)

Designed and scaled Java/Scala microservices and batch/streaming pipelines on GCP that supported MAU growth from ~300M to ~500M and enabled zero-incident Spotify Wrapped launches for millions of users.

Java Scala Kafka GCP PostgreSQL Redis CI CD Observability

Software Development Engineer

Amazon

Sep 2017 - Apr 2020 (2 years 7 months)

Engineered scalable Java/Spring Boot backend services for Alexa information experiences supporting 50M+ users with 99.9% uptime; reduced end-to-end voice query latency by 30% and cut service downtime by 20% through operational excellence.

Java Spring Boot AWS Distributed Systems Messaging Monitoring Performance Optimization Incident Response

Senior Software Engineer

UnitedHealth

Nov 2012 - Sep 2017 (4 years 10 months)

Led redesign of UnitedHealth's Provider Portal to support 200K+ monthly provider users, improving self-service adoption and reducing inquiry-related support calls by 25% through modular, performant frontend architecture.

JavaScript HTML5 CSS3 OAUTH2 REST APIs CI CD Automated Testing

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Boston University

Master of Science, Computer Science

2010 - 2012

Completed a Master's degree in Computer Science with coursework and projects focused on advanced topics in software engineering and distributed systems.