Engineering leader with 18 years of experience building and operating high-throughput, latency-sensitive API infrastructure and distributed systems. Proven track record owning the hot path of critical API platforms — including rate limiting, request routing, load balancing, and quota enforcement systems — at financial-services scale. Expertise in fault-tolerant microservices architecture (Circuit Breaker, Saga, backpressure), real-time event streaming (Kafka), and cloud-native infrastructure (AWS, Kubernetes). Experienced in setting latency SLOs, managing error budgets, and leading cross-functional capacity-planning initiatives. Consistently builds and scales high-performing engineering teams through clear expectations, direct feedback, and genuine investment in engineer growth.