Christopher Chu

About

Backend/data engineer with experience at Nike building high-volume order orchestration and validation APIs using FastAPI microservices on AWS EKS with Kafka, Redis, and Postgres. Strong in production reliability (timeouts/retries/idempotency), GitOps (Argo CD) + Terraform deployments, and data pipelines (AWS Glue/S3), with hands-on incident ownership and legacy modernization into API-driven services.

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Built and maintained high-volume order orchestration/validation APIs on FastAPI microservices (AWS EKS)
• Reliability engineering: explicit timeouts/retries based on idempotency, async isolation of slow dependencies, domain error types
• GitOps delivery on EKS using Argo CD with Terraform-managed infrastructure and CI-produced versioned images
• Cost and scaling optimization using autoscaling tuning, load testing, real-traffic metrics, and queue/backpressure controls
• ETL/data pipeline design on AWS (S3 + Glue) with schema validation, backward-compatible transforms, retries and dead-letter paths
• Legacy modernization via incremental extraction to APIs with parity validation (side-by-side outputs, contract tests) and feature-flagged rollouts
• Production SQL performance tuning using execution plans, composite indexes, pagination/batching, and partitioning strategies
• Owned batch/pipeline incident response: detected via dashboards/alerts, triaged with structured logs, mitigated via throttling and safe reroutes, prevented recurrence with backpressure and tighter timeouts