Demo

Maya Chen

Seattle, WA

Staff Software Engineer

Professional Summary

Builds distributed control planes for fleets that cannot pause for a region outage. Placement, lease management, and API deprecation are the day job; the night job is teaching other teams how not to invent a second source of truth.

At Northline, led the scheduler that cut cross-region failover from 90 seconds to 11 across 14 clusters. Before that, shipped Harborline's mesh and shard rebalancer, and learned packet-level telemetry at Rainier Packet Co.

Skills

12 years:

Distributed Systems

10 years:

Go,

AWS

9 years:

Observability,

Kubernetes

8 years:

System Design,

TypeScript

7 years:

Technical Leadership

Work Experience

Northline Control Systems - Seattle, WA

Staff Software Engineer — April 2021 to present

Designed the multi-region scheduler that fails a zone in 11 seconds and cut dual-write incidents 73% Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, Go, System Design
Replaced ad-hoc heartbeats with a quorum lease API and cut leader flaps 81% Distributed Systems, Go, Observability
Versioned the public CRDs and shipped clients that 19 internal teams adopted in six months TypeScript, Go, Technical Leadership, AWS

Harborline Software - Seattle, WA

Senior Software Engineer — January 2019 to March 2021

Rolled out a sidecar mesh across 46 services and cut p99 latency 28% Kubernetes, Observability, AWS
Wrote a Go rebalancer that drained hot shards and cut peak hotspot CPU from 94% to 61% Distributed Systems, Go, System Design

Software Engineer — August 2016 to January 2019

Built the usage billing pipeline that cut late invoice events from 4.2% to 0.3% TypeScript, AWS, System Design
Added drain-aware autoscaler hooks and cut node-replacement incidents 62% in two quarters Kubernetes, AWS, Observability

Rainier Packet Co. - Redmond, WA

Software Engineer — July 2014 to July 2016

Ported the packet classifier to Go and cut 10 Gbps classification latency 41% Go, System Design
Shipped a structured edge telemetry exporter that cut blackhole MTTD from 22 minutes to 6 Observability, AWS, TypeScript

Featured Projects

Northline multi-region placement engine design notes Distributed Systems, Kubernetes, Go, System Design

Open design notes and a reference scheduler that places stateful workloads across regions and drains a failed zone in 11 seconds. Built for operators who are tired of a second etcd becoming the architecture. Includes the lease rules that kept dual-write incidents from returning with the next region.

Production control-plane SLO and paging playbook Observability, Technical Leadership

A public write-up of the reconcile-latency and leader-election SLOs Northline uses in production, including the dashboards that made split-brain pages rare. Written so a new on-call can tell a burn from a noisy saturation without a war room.

Education

University of Washington

B.S. Computer Science — June 2014

Certifications

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Cloud Native Computing Foundation — April 2020

Credential ID: CKA-MAYA-8841

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional

Amazon Web Services — September 2022

Credential ID: SAP-MAYA-2209