Open to opportunities

Patrick Ellis

@patrickellis

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Senior software engineer specializing in scalable distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior engineering roles focused on scalable backend systems, cloud-native infrastructure, strong observability, technical leadership, and opportunities to mentor and drive architecture.

I am a senior software engineer with 15+ years designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems across startups and enterprise environments. I specialize in Go, Java, and Python, and I build reliable backend infrastructure that processes billions of requests and serves millions of users.

I have led major modernization efforts, migrated systems to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), and implemented infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and observability to improve reliability and reduce costs. My work has reduced deployment time by 65%, cut infrastructure costs by millions annually, and improved latency and uptime metrics significantly.

I mentor engineers, guide architectural decisions, and drive cross-functional initiatives to scale teams and systems. I focus on performance optimization, system reliability, and delivering production-ready solutions that support rapid growth.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

GitHub

May 2021 - Present (5 years 1 month)

Architected distributed backend systems in Go processing 10M+ API requests daily and led CI/CD modernization to enable 500+ daily deployments, reducing incidents by 55% and cutting deployment time by 65%.

Go Distributed Systems Terraform GitHub Actions ArgoCD AWS GCP Datadog Performance Optimization

Current

Staff Engineer

Current

Kickstarter

Apr 2018 - Present (8 years 2 months)

Architected distributed payment processing and event-driven streaming systems in Java and Python handling $1B+ annually, led AWS migration with Kubernetes/Terraform reducing operational overhead by 40%.

Java Python Kafka AWS Kubernetes Terraform Redis Performance Tuning

Senior Backend Engineer

SoundCloud

Apr 2011 - Sep 2017 (6 years 5 months)

Engineered distributed audio streaming systems serving 175M+ users and 5B+ requests daily, migrated infrastructure to AWS and redesigned backend into microservices to improve deployment frequency and reduce latency by 40%.