Julian Mercer
Python Developer
San Francisco, CA | (415) 555-0148 | julian.mercer@email.com | linkedin.com/in/julianmercerProfessional Summary
Python Developer with 8+ years of experience building APIs, automation, and data-processing services at Dropbox, Instagram, and Reddit. Delivers reliable Django and FastAPI systems with strong testing, observability, database performance, and cloud operations.
Core Skills
Python | Django | FastAPI | Flask | PostgreSQL | Redis | Celery | Kafka | pytest | mypy | Airflow | REST APIs | AWS | Docker | Kubernetes
Professional Experience
- Designed FastAPI services processing 1.9B daily metadata events, sustaining 99.99% availability during regional failover tests under sustained production load.
- Reduced p95 request latency 44% through async I/O, PostgreSQL query plans, and Redis caching, saving $2.1M annually while preserving headroom during batch spikes.
- Built idempotent Celery workflows for file-recovery operations, cutting duplicate processing 93% across 14M monthly jobs with replay-safe recovery paths.
- Introduced mypy, Ruff, pytest, and contract tests across seven services, reducing change-failure rate from 8.7% to 3.2%.
- Created OpenTelemetry traces and SLO alerts that reduced median incident diagnosis from 61 to 24 minutes.
- Profiled asynchronous request paths and database access, reducing p95 API latency 31% during peak collaboration traffic.
- Built Django moderation APIs serving 480M daily requests, improving enforcement-decision delivery 18% while maintaining predictable latency during incident spikes.
- Optimized ORM queries and partitioned high-volume tables, reducing database CPU 27% at unchanged traffic while sustaining moderation throughput.
- Developed Kafka consumers with dead-letter handling, lowering unprocessed safety events 72% and giving operators traceable replay and recovery workflows.
- Automated deployment checks and canaries, cutting rollback time from 28 to nine minutes and reducing the blast radius of failed service changes in production.
- Designed zero-downtime schema migrations and rollback checks for 22 production releases with no customer data loss.
- Developed Python APIs for community moderation tools used by 74,000 active moderators, standardizing permissions, audit events, and error handling.
- Built Airflow pipelines for abuse reporting, improving daily dataset freshness from 82% to 98% and making missed partitions visible before analyst workflows began.
- Added pytest fixtures and integration environments that reduced test setup time 36% across three teams and made service-level regressions easier to reproduce.
- Reworked background-job retries and rate limits, reducing queue-related incidents 31% while improving recovery during downstream service degradation in production.
- Built typed command-line tools for incident triage and data repair, cutting recurring operational work by 18 hours per week.
Education
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
Certifications
PCAP Certified Associate in Python Programming | AWS Certified Developer - Associate | Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
