Nathan Hill
Houston,TX
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead
Plaid
Remote
09.2023 - Current
- Led development of backend services supporting Plaid's financial data platforms using Python (FastAPI), React, and AWS, enabling reliable ingestion and processing of banking data from thousands of financial institutions while improving P95 API latency by 35% and maintaining 99.95% platform availability.
- Built and maintained microservices and APIs powering financial data ingestion, normalization, and delivery to fintech applications through Plaid's developer platform.
- Designed and implemented secure REST and gRPC APIs enabling fintech developers to connect banking data, accounts, and transaction streams and identity data.
- Engineered event-driven financial data pipelines using AsyncIO, Celery, and Kafka, enabling near-real-time synchronization of transaction updates and webhook notifications for fintech partners.
- Designed and implemented secure authentication and authorization frameworks using OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, and RBAC, ensuring compliant and secure access to sensitive financial data.
- Designed and optimized data storage layers using PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and Redis, applying indexing, partitioning, and caching strategies to support billions of financial records and high-throughput API workloads.
- Built developer-facing dashboards and integration tooling using React, Next.js, and TypeScript, enabling fintech partners to monitor integrations, debug financial data pipelines, and manage API usage.
- Operated cloud-native infrastructure on AWS, leveraging EC2, API Gateway, Lambda, SQS/SNS, RDS, and CloudWatch to support scalable event-driven financial data services with strong reliability and observability.
- Containerized and deployed distributed financial data services using Docker and Kubernetes, establishing automated CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform to enable reliable, repeatable deployments across cloud environments.
- Implemented platform-wide observability using Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, improving monitoring coverage across dozens of services, reducing alert noise by 40%+, and significantly improving incident detection and mean time to resolution.
- Led cross-functional engineering initiatives across platform, infrastructure, and data engineering teams, establishing architectural standards and improving developer productivity and platform scalability.
- Implemented comprehensive automated testing strategies across backend and frontend systems using PyTest, Jest, React Testing Library, and Playwright, ensuring reliability and compliance for financial data services.
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Stripe
Remote
05.2021 - 09.2023
- Built distributed backend services in Python powering core payment processing workflows, including transaction authorization, settlement, and reconciliation across Stripe's global merchant platform supporting millions of daily payment transactions across thousands of merchants.
- Developed secure RESTful and GraphQL APIs enabling merchants and internal services to interact with payment infrastructure, implementing OAuth2, OpenID Connect, and JWT-based authentication to safeguard sensitive financial data.
- Built high-performance merchant operations dashboards using React, TypeScript, and modern state management patterns, integrating GraphQL-based data services to provide real-time visibility into millions of transaction events, disputes, and payment analytics.
- Modeled and optimized large-scale transactional data systems using PostgreSQL, designing schemas and indexing strategies to support billions of payment records and ensure reliable financial reporting.
- Improved system performance through query optimization, Redis-based caching, and efficient data access patterns, reducing API response latency by 35% and increasing throughput for high-traffic payment endpoints handling 40K+ requests per minute.
- Designed event-driven backend services using Kafka to process payment lifecycle events, enabling reliable downstream workflows such as fraud monitoring, ledger updates, and merchant notifications across dozens of internal payment services.
- Built and deployed cloud-based services on AWS, leveraging EC2, S3, and containerized workloads to support scalable, highly available payment infrastructure processing tens of thousands of transactions per minute.
- Implemented idempotent payment processing and reconciliation safeguards to ensure financial data consistency and correctness across distributed services processing high-volume transaction streams.
- Improved system observability through structured logging, monitoring, and distributed tracing, enabling faster detection and resolution of production issues across critical payment services.
- Collaborated closely with product, infrastructure, and risk engineering teams to design scalable, fault-tolerant services supporting high-throughput financial operations.
- Participated in on-call rotations and incident response, diagnosing and resolving production issues across 10+ distributed payment services, while improving system reliability and operational resilience.
- Strengthened system reliability through automated testing, code reviews, and continuous delivery practices, supporting weekly production deployments in a high-availability environment.
Python Full Stack Engineer
Zapier
Remote
09.2015 - 05.2021
- Built scalable workflow automation services using Python and Django, developing RESTful APIs enabling integrations between Zapier's platform and hundreds of third-party SaaS applications.
- Designed and implemented event-driven automation pipelines, processing webhook triggers and application events to execute user-defined workflows across connected services handling millions of automation tasks daily.
- Developed full-stack user interfaces using React and modern JavaScript, enabling users to configure automation workflows, manage integrations, and monitor execution results.
- Engineered data persistence layers using PostgreSQL and Redis, supporting high-volume automation events while optimizing query performance and caching frequently accessed workflow data.
- Built asynchronous task processing systems using Celery and message queues, enabling reliable execution of background jobs and large-scale automation workflows.
- Deployed and operated cloud-based automation services on AWS, leveraging EC2, S3, and SQS to support scalable and resilient integration infrastructure.
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and Git-based workflows, enabling automated builds, testing, and deployments across multiple service environments.
- Improved platform reliability through comprehensive automated testing using PyTest, ensuring stable integrations and reliable workflow execution across hundreds of third-party APIs.
Timeline
Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead
Plaid
09.2023 - Current
Senior Full Stack Engineer
Stripe
05.2021 - 09.2023
Python Full Stack Engineer
Zapier
09.2015 - 05.2021