Andy Li
Senior Software Engineer with 6+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production.
Strong focus on reliability and concurrency-safe service design, with expertise in real-time request paths and predictable latency.
About
Building scalable systems with a focus on performance, reliability, and maintainability.
Senior Software Engineer with 6+ years of experience designing, building, and operating distributed backend systems in production. Strong focus on reliability and concurrency-safe service design, with expertise in real-time request paths and predictable latency.
Experienced owning production services end to end, including on-call rotations, incident response, and disciplined rollout and rollback practices.
I specialize in designing and operating backend services that support high-traffic consumer platforms. My work involves building APIs and data models with careful schema design to support high read/write concurrency and strict availability requirements.
Through caching layers, asynchronous processing, and optimized data access patterns, I focus on reducing request latency and improving throughput. I deploy and operate services in the cloud with infrastructure as code, ensuring reproducible environments and predictable scaling behavior.
Instrumenting services with structured logging and metrics improves observability and reduces mean time to diagnose production incidents. I participate in on-call rotations, leading incident response and driving post-incident reviews to reduce recurrence.
Professional Experience
Building and operating scalable backend systems with a focus on performance, reliability, and maintainability.
Senior Software Engineer
Yelp
- Designed and operated real-time backend services to support high-traffic consumer platforms with strict availability and tail-latency requirements
- Built distributed services with explicit handling for retries, idempotency, and partial failures, and asynchronous processing
- Deployed and operated services in the cloud with infrastructure defined as code for reproducible environments and predictable scaling
- Instrumented services end to end with metrics, structured logs, and alerts to enable fast detection, diagnosis, and rollback during production incidents
- Participated in on-call rotations, leading incident response, coordinating mitigations across services, and driving post-incident reviews to reduce recurrence
Software Engineer
Best Buy
- Developed backend services and SQL-based data stores to support large-scale commerce and marketplace workflows
- Optimized queries and service performance to maintain stable response times during high-volume retail events
- Improved release safety through pipeline enhancements, staged rollouts, and rollback-ready deployment practices in containerized environments
- Collaborated with platform and operations teams on deployments and production monitoring
Full Stack Software Engineer
Open Systems International
- Built backend APIs and data models for enterprise systems supporting real-time monitoring and control workflows
- Designed services with clear API contracts and explicit handling of timeouts, edge cases, and downstream dependency failures
- Supported production systems through on-call rotations, operational debugging, and incident mitigation
- Mentored junior engineers on system design fundamentals, backend reliability, and code quality
Notable Projects
Key projects showcasing scalable backend architecture and performance optimization.
Scalable Backend Architecture
Designed and implemented microservices architecture handling high-volume daily traffic. Built APIs with advanced caching and queuing strategies, and automated deployment pipelines with infrastructure as code.
Impact: 30% reduction in critical outages, 40% reduction in request latency, 4x faster feature delivery with zero downtime rollouts.
Data Services API Platform
Architected APIs for data services that optimized payload sizes and response times. Implemented caching strategies, improved data consistency in distributed systems, and reduced reconciliation errors through schema refinements.
Impact: 20% reduction in payload sizes, 25% reduction in reconciliation errors, improved efficiency in client-server interactions.
Marketplace Platform
Spearheaded architecture design for scalable marketplace platform. Optimized backend queries and storage models, implemented monitoring dashboards, and migrated legacy services to modular architectures.
Impact: 40% increase in transaction speed, 40% lower database response times during peak demand, 35% improvement in system resilience.
Enterprise Control Systems
Designed backend APIs for enterprise control systems enabling real-time monitoring. Built secure service layers, optimized schema and storage models, and implemented real-time messaging workflows.
Impact: 25% reduction in system latency, 30% reduction in backend failure incidents, 40% reduction in alert processing times.
Core Skills
Technologies and practices I use to build scalable, reliable systems.
Backend & Systems
Data
Cloud & Infrastructure
Engineering Practices
Get in Touch
Open to senior engineering roles and consulting opportunities. Let's connect.