Theo Langford

Senior Backend Engineer

Austin, TX, United States

Professional Summary

Theo Langford - Senior Backend EngineerSenior backend engineer with 8+ years building reliable APIs, data pipelines, and distributed systems for fintech and B2B SaaS. Strong in Go, Python, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS. Known for cutting latency, improving on-call signal, and mentoring mid-level engineers.

Employment History

Senior Backend Engineer

Hill Country Systems · Austin, TX

Jan, 2021 · Present

• Lead design of event-driven billing and entitlements services (Go + Kafka) serving 2M+ monthly active accounts. • Cut p99 API latency 42% by introducing connection pooling, query plans, and regional read replicas. • Built internal platform libraries that reduced new-service bootstrap time from ~2 weeks to 3 days. • Mentored 4 engineers; owned on-call for payments cluster with 99.95% availability over trailing 12 months.

Backend Engineer

Red River Analytics · Austin, TX

Mar, 2018 · Dec, 2020

• Owned Python/FastAPI ingestion pipeline processing 80M events/day into Snowflake and PostgreSQL. • Introduced schema versioning and dead-letter queues that dropped data-loss incidents by 70%. • Partnered with data science to ship feature-store APIs used by 12 production ML models.

Software Engineer

Lone Star Fintech · Round Rock, TX

Jun, 2015 · Feb, 2018

• Built REST and gRPC services for account onboarding and KYC document workflows. • Migrated monolith modules to services; reduced deploy risk and cut release cycle from monthly to weekly. • Wrote integration tests and CI gates that became the team standard.

Education

B.S. Computer Science

University of Texas at Austin · Austin, TX

Sep, 2011 · May, 2015

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

Kafka

AWS

Redis

gRPC

Terraform

Docker

Observability

System Design