Open to opportunities

Peter Cai

@petercai1

Senior software engineer building scalable MERN web platforms with AI-driven features and high-performance backend systems.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a team where I can build efficient, reliable, high-throughput systems—leading scalable backend work on MERN stacks, integrating AI features into production, and continuously improving engineering practices with strong observability and testing.

I’m a Senior Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience building scalable web applications, with a strong focus on MERN stack technologies and backend systems. I specialize in solving complex performance, scalability, and data processing challenges, and I enjoy integrating AI-driven features into production.

At Snap Inc, I designed and built a high-throughput content recommendation backend using Node.js and Express, restructuring ranking logic into a unified service layer to improve maintainability. I modeled complex interaction data in MongoDB to reduce aggregation overhead and improved responsiveness with React (Hooks + Context API). I also integrated lightweight AI ranking via TensorFlow.js, implemented Redis caching, and strengthened reliability with error handling, request tracing, and API validation.

Previously, at TikTok I built a creator analytics platform with React and Redux Toolkit, introduced GraphQL to reduce over-fetching, and shipped AI-powered tagging through OpenAI APIs with Python microservices. I’ve also delivered backend and data pipelines at Bloomberg LP using Java (Spring Boot), PostgreSQL optimizations, and ETL with Python, while backing my work with solid testing practices and engineering discipline.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Research Intern

ByteDance

Dec 2018 - Sep 2019 (9 months)

Built experimental React interfaces that let researchers visualize and interact with early-stage AI models. Designed flexible MongoDB storage for rapidly evolving datasets and wrote Jest unit tests and API integration tests to validate frontend–backend communication.

React MongoDB Schema Design Jest API Testing Unit Testing

Research Intern

Microsoft

May 2018 - Sep 2018 (4 months)

Developed HTML/CSS/JavaScript UI components to support internal AI experimentation tools. Built Python data-preprocessing scripts and lightweight Flask APIs, adding unittest test coverage to improve reliability of experiment workflows.

HTML CSS JavaScript Python Flask Unit Testing data preprocessing API Development