Alex Chen
Senior Software Engineer
San Francisco, CA · alex@alexchen.dev
Senior software engineer with 9 years of experience building high-scale web applications. I specialize in React and TypeScript on the frontend, and Node.js and PostgreSQL on the backend. I care about developer experience, performance, and accessibility — and I enjoy mentoring engineers and contributing to open source.
Work Experience
Stripe · San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)
Lead frontend infrastructure on Stripe's Dashboard team, shipping features used by millions of businesses globally. Architect and maintain React component libraries, improve developer experience, and mentor junior engineers.
- Reduced dashboard load time by 38% through code-splitting, lazy loading, and strategic caching strategies
- Designed and led adoption of a shared component library now used across 12 internal product teams
- Introduced automated accessibility audits into CI/CD pipeline, bringing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance to 94% of surfaces
- Mentored 4 junior engineers through structured pairing sessions and bi-weekly 1:1s
Shopify · Remote
Built and maintained core e-commerce platform features serving over 1.7 million merchants. Worked across the full stack with Ruby on Rails and React, contributing to the Storefront API and merchant-facing admin tools.
- Delivered the initial Storefront API v2 migration for 200+ partner integrations, cutting average query latency by 55%
- Built a real-time order tracking UI with WebSockets, adopted by 40% of merchants within 3 months of launch
- Collaborated with design and product to ship the redesigned checkout flow, improving conversion rate by 12%
- Championed and implemented end-to-end testing practices using Cypress, raising test coverage from 42% to 78%
Buildspace Labs · Oakland, CA
First engineering hire at an early-stage developer tools startup. Owned the frontend from ground up — built the marketing site, product dashboard, and internal tooling that helped the company grow from 0 to 8,000 users.
- Architected and built the entire frontend product from scratch using React and Firebase
- Designed and implemented the onboarding flow that achieved a 68% completion rate
- Established the front-end coding standards and review processes still used by the engineering team today
Education
B.S. in Computer Science
Graduated with honors. Relevant coursework included Data Structures & Algorithms, Operating Systems, Databases, Human-Computer Interaction, and Introduction to Machine Learning. Senior capstone project: a distributed task scheduling system built in Go, presented at the departmental showcase.