Jordan Ellis
Software Engineer Β· Backend & Cloud
Austin, United States
About
Software Engineer with 6 years of experience building backend services and cloud infrastructure for B2B SaaS products. Designed REST and event-driven APIs in Python and TypeScript serving 40M requests a day, cut infrastructure cost 31% by migrating workloads to Kubernetes on AWS, and led code review and mentoring for a team of five. Comfortable owning a service end to end, from schema design in PostgreSQL to CI/CD and on-call.
Experience
- Northwind AnalyticsΒ· Senior Software EngineerAustin, TX (hybrid)2023-02 β Present
- Own the ingestion platform (Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Redis) that processes 40M events a day for 300+ enterprise customers with 99.95% availability.
- Migrated 14 services from EC2 to Kubernetes (EKS) with Terraform and Helm, reducing monthly infrastructure spend 31% and deploy time from 45 minutes to 6.
- Designed an event-driven pipeline on AWS (SQS, Lambda, S3) that replaced nightly batch jobs and cut data freshness from 24 hours to under 5 minutes.
- Lead code review for a team of five engineers and mentor two junior developers; introduced ADRs and a testing standard that raised coverage from 54% to 86%.
- Built the CI/CD pipeline in GitHub Actions with canary deploys and automated rollback, taking production incidents caused by releases from 6 per quarter to 1.
- Bluefin SoftwareΒ· Software EngineerRemote2020-06 β 2023-01
- Developed customer-facing features across a Django and React stack for a payments product used by 12,000 merchants; shipped in two-week Scrum sprints.
- Rewrote the reporting API in TypeScript (Node.js) with Elasticsearch, bringing p95 latency down from 2.4 s to 380 ms.
- Introduced Docker-based local environments and integration tests, cutting onboarding time for new engineers from two weeks to three days.
- Handled on-call for the payments service and authored runbooks that reduced mean time to recovery by 40%.
- Campus Labs (internship)Β· Software Engineering InternAustin, TX2019-06 β 2019-09
- Built an internal dashboard in React and Next.js consuming a REST API, adopted by 30 support staff.
- Wrote unit tests in Jest and pytest and fixed 25 backlog bugs in a MongoDB-backed service.
Education
- University of Texas at AustinΒ· B.S. Computer ScienceComputer Science2016-08 β 2020-05
Coursework: distributed systems, databases, algorithms. Teaching assistant for Data Structures.
Projects
- queue-liteΒ· Creator and maintainerhttps://github.com/jordan-ellis-dev/queue-lite
Open-source job queue for Python on top of Redis with retries, priorities and a small dashboard. 1,200 GitHub stars, used in production by three companies.
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect β Associate Β· Amazon Web Services (2024)
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Β· The Linux Foundation (2023)