Joseph Lee

About

Backend/data engineer with Optum healthcare claims domain experience building high-reliability Python microservices (FastAPI/Kafka/Postgres) and AWS data platforms (EKS, Glue, Redshift). Demonstrated strong production ownership: fixed duplicate Kafka processing via transactional outbox/idempotency, scaled to millions of daily events, and delivered major SQL performance gains (40+ min to <5 min, ~60% CPU reduction). Seeking remote-only work; targets $130k base.

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Designed and operated Python microservices with FastAPI/Kafka/PostgreSQL handling millions of daily claim updates
• Reliability engineering: OAuth2/JWT auth, retries/backoff, timeouts, circuit breakers, centralized error handling, metrics/logging (Prometheus/ELK)
• Resolved Kafka duplicate-processing/state consistency issues using idempotency keys and transactional outbox pattern
• Scaled high-volume pipelines via partitioning, async worker pools, batching, backpressure controls, and horizontal scaling
• Delivered AWS EKS-based production platform with Terraform + GitHub Actions CI/CD, Helm deployments, and secure secrets management
• Cost optimization: spot instances, quotas, retention policies, Glacier tiering, and FinOps tagging/dashboards
• Built Glue ETL (S3->Redshift) with schema evolution/versioning, data quality checks (Deequ), and quarantine/reprocessing flows
• Modernized legacy SAS analytics to Python/Spark with parallel-run parity validation to 99.9%
• SQL performance tuning with measured impact (40+ min to <5 min; ~60% CPU reduction) using explain plans and indexing