Open to opportunities

Stephen Zolper

@stephenzolper

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Senior software engineer building distributed observability systems and AI-powered troubleshooting.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking to build large-scale distributed systems with strong observability and security, where I can ship real-time dashboards, event-driven pipelines, and AI-assisted troubleshooting that reduces MTTR and improves reliability.

I’m a Senior Software Engineer focused on building distributed, real-time platforms that make systems easier to monitor, debug, and scale. I architect full-stack solutions and the underlying services that power mission-critical reliability.

At Google, I led the architecture and development of full-stack observability platforms and distributed telemetry systems. I built a cloud service mesh observability platform with React/TypeScript/Next.js and WebSockets, engineered high-performance BFF services with Java and gRPC, and delivered dashboards that improved reliability and incident detection.

I also built and scaled payment and fraud capabilities at Stripe, including distributed ledgering APIs and real-time fraud detection pipelines. I improved settlement latency, prevented $5M+ in monthly fraudulent transactions, and supported robust onboarding flows with React, TypeScript, and GraphQL.

Earlier at Flatiron Health, I developed EHR integrations and real-time patient monitoring for OncoEMR. I improved data processing speed, reduced dashboard load times, and led HIPAA/SOC2-aligned deployments using Docker, AWS, and secure API patterns.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Software Engineer

Current

Google

Feb 2020 - Present (6 years 2 months)

Led the architecture and development of full-stack observability platforms and distributed telemetry systems for large-scale enterprise monitoring. Built a service-mesh observability platform and BFF services that reduced data-fetch latency by 45%, improved incident diagnosis time by 35%, and enabled real-time alerting across 5,000+ projects.

React TypeScript Next.js WebSockets gRPC Microservices Kubernetes Kafka Apache Spark Vertex AI

Senior Software Engineer

Stripe

Nov 2016 - Feb 2020 (3 years 3 months)

Architected and built distributed payment systems and financial infrastructure, including high-performance ledgering APIs and real-time fraud detection pipelines. Reduced settlement latency by 35% and helped prevent $5M+ in monthly fraudulent transactions during merchant onboarding.

Java Ruby gRPC REST GraphQL Microservices OAUTH2 Kafka AWS Kinesis PostgreSQL

Software Engineer

Flatiron Health

Dec 2013 - Nov 2016 (2 years 11 months)

Developed end-to-end features for OncoEMR and clinical data pipelines, including EHR integrations and real-time patient monitoring. Improved data processing speed by 40%, reduced dashboard load times by 50%, and delivered alerting and visualizations across 1M+ patient records with HIPAA-aligned controls.