James Deny Perper

01About

For over twelve years I have worked on backend platforms and distributed systems, most recently as a lead engineer guiding teams of six to fourteen people. My work sits between architecture and people: choosing the boring technology that will still make sense in five years, writing the design documents that let others move fast, and keeping on-call rotations calm.

I care about clear interfaces, honest estimates, and code that reads like careful prose. I mentor generously, review thoroughly, and still ship a meaningful share of the code myself.

02Selected work

• Ledgerline 2024–25

  An event-sourced payments ledger processing ~40 million transactions a day with exactly-once settlement and full auditability.

  Go · PostgreSQL · Kafka · led design & team of 9
• Harbor 2023

  An internal developer platform that cut new-service setup from two weeks to under an hour through templated pipelines and golden paths.

  Kubernetes · Terraform · Backstage · architecture
• Quietwatch 2022

  An observability overhaul unifying traces, logs and metrics; reduced mean time to recovery by 63% and halved paging noise.

  OpenTelemetry · Grafana · Rust collectors
• Strata 2020–21

  Incremental migration of a ten-year-old monolith into well-bounded services, with zero customer-facing downtime across eighteen months.

  Java · Kotlin · gRPC · strangler-fig pattern

03Experience

• Lead Software Engineer, Northvale Payments 2022–now

  Technical lead for core ledger and settlement. Own architecture roadmap, hiring and the engineering review process.

• Senior Software Engineer, Kallio Systems 2018–22

  Platform team. Led the monolith decomposition and introduced service-level objectives company-wide.

• Software Engineer, Brightfold 2015–18

  Backend services for a logistics product; built the routing engine and real-time tracking APIs.

• Junior Developer, Saimaa Digital 2013–15

  Web applications and integrations for public-sector clients.

04Toolkit

Languages

Go, Kotlin, Java, Rust, TypeScript, SQL

Systems

Distributed systems, event sourcing, API design, data modelling

Platform

Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Kafka, PostgreSQL

Practice

Observability, SLOs, incident response, CI/CD

Leadership

Technical strategy, design reviews, mentoring, hiring