Oliver Harper

Designing systems that survive scale

Staff Software Engineer

distributed deletion pipeline

event-drivenorchestration

designed and delivered a queue-based deletion pipeline that cleared a multi-million-customer backlog, scaled to 60k customers a day, and kept recovery predictable under load

60k+

customers processed at peak

$64m

regulatory risk removed

zero-downtime schema evolution

cosmos dbmigration

redesigned and delivered a live schema migration across 200m+ records, making critical queries 10-15x faster and the data model far easier to evolve without downtime

200m+

production docs re-modeled

15x

query speed improvement

selected outcomes

metrics & milestones

the strongest technical decisions did more than clean up systems. they removed risk, increased revenue, reduced cost, and made teams faster

what sits behind the numbers

the work that made the numbers possible

These results came from practical engineering work before systems were under pressure: isolating failures per customer instead of per batch, removing unnecessary API calls, and creating migration paths that let live data change without downtime

I stay close to the architecture, rollout, implementation, and production behavior because that is where cost, throughput, and risk are usually decided

let's talk

CPU reduction

97%

team velocity increase

30%

performance snapshot

response-time reduction

95%

daily notifications

10m+

resource reduction

41%

live migration (gb)

100+

infra savings

$6k

what I own

I own the technical decisions, delivery paths, and cross-team alignment behind systems that need to scale, evolve, and stay operable under real business pressure

/01

I define system boundaries, integration patterns, and rollout shape so teams can add capability without making the platform harder to operate

/02

I improve throughput, latency, and cost where architecture is the real bottleneck: unnecessary calls, wasteful data access, and runtime patterns that do not hold at production volume

/03

I plan and deliver migrations that keep live systems moving while data models, contracts, and infrastructure change underneath them

/04

I give ambiguous work a clear technical path, align the teams involved, and stay close enough to delivery for the decision to hold up in production

operating model

from ambiguity to production

how I work

I usually add the most value before the code is written: choosing the right path early, planning safe change, and staying involved until the result is proven in production

operating principle

4/4

judgment with AI leverage

I make the important decisions early, then stay with the work through production

problem framing

make the decision clear

I make the important constraints and tradeoffs clear early, so the team is solving the right problem from the start

safe change

build the rollback into the plan

I break risky changes into smaller, reversible steps, so live systems can move forward without betting everything on one release

hands-on execution

stay close to the code

I stay close to the code in migrations, hot paths, and unclear systems. I still write and review production code, and I use AI to speed up implementation without lowering the bar

production ownership

verify the result under load

I take changes into production, watch the signals that matter, and adjust until the result shows up in performance, cost, reliability, or delivery speed