Joshua Nelson
Senior Backend Engineer (Golang)
Education
- Dean's Honors List (all semesters)
- President of ACM Student Chapter
Experience
- Architected and deployed concurrent Go microservices handling 15,000+ req/sec with sub-8ms P99 latency across AWS multi-region EKS.
- Engineered event-driven streaming pipeline using Kafka and Go worker pools, processing 30M+ events daily with zero data loss.
- Refactored legacy monolith into Go gRPC microservices, slashing cloud compute costs by 38% and build times from 45m to 3m.
- Profiled runtime memory and CPU bottlenecks using pprof, reducing garbage collection overhead by 52%.
- Designed resilient payment transaction engine in Go, processing over $150M in annualized transactions.
- Implemented distributed rate limiting and token-bucket circuit breakers using Redis to prevent cascade failures.
- Optimized PostgreSQL queries and connection pooling (pgx), improving API response times by 45%.
- Developed telemetry ingestion service in Go and PostgreSQL, collecting metrics from 50,000+ connected IoT devices.
- Containerized backend microservices using Docker and automated CI/CD deployments using GitHub Actions.
Projects
- Implemented distributed consensus protocol with leader election and fault-tolerant replicated state machine.
- Benchmarked throughput reaching 100,000 tasks/second across a 5-node cluster.