Open to opportunities

Rick Zhang

@rickzhang

Message

Senior backend engineer building scalable data platforms, analytics pipelines, and personalization systems.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I seek senior backend or platform roles where I can design scalable, secure data and ML-serving systems, improve performance and cost, and mentor teams in a collaborative, product-focused environment.

I am a senior backend engineer with over 10 years building scalable data platforms, analytics pipelines, and personalization systems for SaaS and e-commerce products.

I design distributed systems and microservices with strong expertise in Node.js, TypeScript, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and data processing frameworks, translating product requirements into production-ready APIs and ML-serving pipelines.

I have led architecture reviews, built event-driven ingestion pipelines processing millions of events per day, optimized query performance and cloud costs, and implemented infrastructure-as-code and robust CI/CD to improve release velocity.

I prioritize observability, security, and reproducible environments, and I collaborate closely with product and customer teams to deliver measurable improvements in performance, cost, and reliability.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Backend Engineer

Current

Latch

Jan 2024 - Present (2 years 1 month)

Designed and implemented scalable analytics microservices and event-driven ingestion pipelines processing 10M+ events/day, improved BigQuery query performance by 45%, and doubled release velocity via CI/CD and canary deployments.

TypeScript GCP Pub Sub Dataflow BigQuery Kubernetes Terraform Docker

Software Engineer

Mediavine

Jan 2020 - Dec 2023 (3 years 11 months)

Built and scaled ad-tech data pipelines with Airflow and BigQuery, implemented event streaming with Kafka/Debezium into BigQuery/Snowflake, and reduced MTTR by 60% through observability and tracing improvements.

Python Airflow BigQuery Kafka Debezium Redis PostgreSQL Terraform Prometheus

Full Stack Developer

AWS

Jun 2015 - Dec 2019 (4 years 6 months)

Engineered highly available services and ETL workflows on AWS (EC2, ECS, EKS, Kinesis) for B2B SaaS, implemented IaC with CloudFormation and Terraform, and improved distributed systems reliability and security.