john plaisted

I am a senior software engineer with 10+ years building low-latency, high-throughput backend and full-stack systems for large-scale production environments. I specialize in trading and metadata platforms, order matching, Kafka pipelines, and performance tuning.

At Chime I architected ultra-low-latency off-chain order-matching services in Go, reduced median matching latency by 42%, and improved tail latency by 60% through lock-free queues and memory tuning. I also implemented a Kafka-based market data pipeline that increased throughput 3.5x while maintaining 99.99% consistency across consumers.

Previously at LinkedIn and Google I scaled metadata ingestion and backend services—boosting ingestion capacity, reducing query latency, and modernizing compilation and streaming models. I have a proven track record improving observability, CI/CD, and reliability with Prometheus, Grafana, Gradle, and GitHub Actions.

I mentor engineers in low-latency design, concurrency, and profiling, and I bring hands-on experience with containerized deployments, Kubernetes, Terraform, and blockchain integrations including Solana smart contract work. I focus on measurable performance gains, robust security, and operational excellence for 24/7 systems.