Senior Backend Engineer, Platform
- Experience owning a service at six figures of requests per minute
- Familiarity with partitioning and online resharding
- Has run an incident, not just been paged for one
Before: Worked on database performance improvements for the orders service.
After: Led migration of the orders table to a hash-partitioned layout, moving 900M rows with no downtime.
Why: The posting names online resharding twice. Your resume had the work but not the word, and not the scale.
Before: Improved checkout performance.
After: Cut p99 checkout latency from 1.4s to 310ms by moving fan-out off the request path.
Why: A number the reader can compare against their own is worth more than the verb "improved".
Before: Participated in the on-call rotation.
After: On-call for the payments path; wrote the runbook still used for processor timeouts.
Why: They ask for someone who has run an incident. Owning the runbook is the evidence.
- No Kafka on your resume; the posting mentions it once, in a list.
- They ask for Go. Yours is Java and Python — worth a line in the note.
Gaps are shown rather than papered over. The assistant rewrites how something is said; it does not invent something you did not do.
