Backend engineer in Java · Distributed systems

William Long

I build high-performance, scalable systems with a focus on transaction processing.

Selected impact

70ms → 20ms · ~30M tx/day
lower critical-path latency

Redesigned a gapless sequence generator after serialized allocation became a production bottleneck. Replaced queue-based coordination with an optimistic allocation model and led the change through implementation and staged production rollout.

10 min → 3 min recovery
faster service recovery

Improved failover for OMS’s distributed transaction commit layer by making blocked I/O interruptible and eliminating stale connections to the previous committer. Then did chaos testing to uncover retry and recovery edge cases that could prevent successful failovers.

Experience


  1. Present

    Software Development Engineer

    Workday · Atlanta, GA

    • Build and operate Workday's Object Management Service (OMS), a Java distributed system over MySQL responsible for business object processing at ~1 trillion transactions annually with ~20 ms average critical-path latency.
    • Redesigned gapless sequence generation after an outage exposed a serialized bottleneck. Lead a small team through an optimistic assignment implementation and rollout that cut sequence generation latency from 70 ms to 20 ms across ~30M transactions per day.
    • Coordinated a library upgrade across dependent teams to make connections to OMS's elected transaction committer interruptible during failover, reducing recovery time from 10 minutes to 3 minutes.
    • Took ownership of a stalled rollout of OMS's ZooKeeper based remote transaction path, using Grafana and production metrics to identify failure modes. Resolved blockers with a data plane change and REST authentication changes for tenant initialization, and then resumed staged deployment.
    • Uncovered and fixed transaction processing failure modes while chaos testing sequence generator changes, corrected retry inconsistencies and unrecoverable states that prevented successful failover to a newly elected transaction committer.
    • Diagnosed and resolved OMS production incidents and outages across AWS, GCP, and private data centers, using logs, metrics, and resource telemetry to isolate failures and restore transaction processing.
    • Developed a test environment leasing system for coding agents, letting engineers run parallel validation without manually provisioning environments; adopted by other engineers across the org.

  2. Associate Manager, Software Development Engineering

    Workday · Atlanta, GA

    • Hired and onboarded 5 engineers for a new Atlanta team through tailored ramp-up plans, mentor pairing, and technical training; the team independently owned payroll API modernization within six months.
    • Negotiated a phased delivery plan for payroll API modernization, aligning customer priorities with team capacity around a roadmap to replace manual data entry with automated integrations.
    • Facilitated chartering sessions for new payroll engineering teams, helping each team establish its own agile practices, ownership model, and working norms.

  3. Senior Developer

    Badlion · Remote

    • Owned backend architecture for a commercial Minecraft client and managed the frontend development team responsible for its web platform and delivery.
    • Scaled Java and Node.js microservices to support growth to millions in annual revenue, improving caching and performance, increasing service capacity, and making deployments more reliable
    • Partitioned hundreds of millions of sales records in PostgreSQL to support an influencer payout program, reducing partner dashboard load times by an average of 2 seconds.
    • Led a frontend modernization effort by turning team proposals into an ADR and phased migration plan, then presented the approach to leadership; delivered the redesign on schedule.
    • Built a GitHub Actions pipeline to package services into Docker containers and deploy them to AWS, eliminating error-prone manual releases and decreasing deployment downtime.
    • Onboarded and mentored 3 new web developers through tailored ramp-up plans, code reviews, and regular technical check-ins, enabling them to ship new features independently.

  4. Software Developer

    Badlion · Remote

    • Took ownership of an incomplete e-commerce backend, implemented shopping cart functionality, order history, receipts, and aiding purchase flows to bring the store to a complete customer experience.
    • Implemented gRPC request routing and round-robin load balancing for a centralized service handling communication between frontend applications and backend instances.
    • Integrated Xsolla payment processing with webhook handling, allowing transactions in additional regions and expanding the product’s addressable market.
    • Created a Java/Node.js service that aggregated and delivered client facing metadata including blog content, store pricing and promotions, and real-time player activity.
    • Developed bespoke Java plugins for a large Minecraft server and contributed OpenGL-based modifications to the company’s custom Minecraft client.

Education

2014
2018

BSc, Computer Science

Lakehead University · Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada