Alex Patel's Portfolio.
Engineering Lead · Distributed Systems · Ruby · Go
Engineering lead with a track record of scaling products from zero to millions of users. I focus on systems design, team growth, and building the kind of engineering culture that attracts great people.
14 capabilitieson record — tools picked up as the work requires.
Selected works.
Payment Retry Engine
Distributed retry system for failed payments using Kafka-based event queuing with per-merchant partition keys, exponential backoff with jitter, and circuit breakers. Handles 2M+ daily retry attempts with 99.1% recovery rate.
GraphQL Storefront API
Unified GraphQL API layer aggregating 12 microservices into a single schema for merchant storefronts. Adopted by 120k+ merchants with sub-50ms P95 latency at 500k RPM peak load.
Real-Time SMS Pipeline
Event-driven Kafka pipeline replacing a polling-based worker for 80M+ daily SMS messages. Improved delivery SLA from 94% to 99.7% and cut median latency from 4.2s to 340ms.
ActiveCache Ruby Gem
Open-source multi-layer caching abstraction for Ruby/Rails with transparent L1/L2 lookups, automatic TTL management, and safe degradation. 1,200+ GitHub stars, 50+ production adopters.
Developer CLI Toolkit
Command-line tool for scaffolding, deploying, and monitoring serverless functions across AWS Lambda and CloudFlare Workers. Built with Go for single-binary distribution. Adopted by 300+ engineers; scaffold to first deploy in under 90 seconds.
The features.
Rebuilding Payment Retry Logic at Scale
Stripe's retry logic for failed payments was a monolithic system causing cascading failures under peak load. I led the redesign into an event-driven retry service — reducing failed payment recovery time by 60% and eliminating 3 recurring production incidents per month.
Read the case studyScaling Checkout for Black Friday
Shopify's checkout infrastructure wasn't built for 10x BFCM spikes. I designed a caching and queue-based session architecture that processed 6.3 million checkouts in 24 hours with zero downtime — a 40% year-over-year increase.
Read the case studyReal-time SMS Notification Platform
Rebuilt Twilio's internal notification delivery pipeline from a polling-based architecture to an event-driven Kafka system — lifting the delivery SLA from 94% to 99.7% and slashing median latency from 4.2 seconds to 340ms.
Read the case studyOpen Source: ActiveCache Ruby Gem
Built and published an open-source multi-layer caching abstraction for Ruby/Rails that has accumulated 1,200+ GitHub stars and is used in production by 50+ companies.
Read the case studyRecord of service.
Engineering lead with a track record of scaling products from zero to millions of users.
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