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👋 Open to consulting — Summer 2025
Hey, I'm Milo Chen —
Hey, I'm Milo Chen —
I build backends that never flinch.
Backend developer and consulting architect in Austin, TX. 11 years shipping products from a blank repo to production at scale — and leading the teams that make it happen.
M
Milo Chen
Backend · Architect
💚 40+ projects shipped
11
Years building
40+
Products shipped
35
Engineers led
99.98%
Avg. uptime
🧑💻 About Me
From whiteboard to production — I handle it all.
Most of my career has been inside product startups — both as a full-time engineering lead and as a consulting architect parachuting in to rescue projects that stalled. I'm the person who asks "what are we optimizing for?" on day one, and "is it deployed yet?" on day 30.
I love the mess of early-stage chaos: vague requirements, tight deadlines, a team of three. I thrive there. I've designed systems that scaled to 50M requests/day, mentored junior devs into senior roles, and I still get a kick out of a clean migration with zero downtime.
🎓
B.S. Computer Science
UT Austin, 2013
📍
Austin, TX
Central time, remote-friendly
☕
Fueled by espresso
And a stubborn refusal to ship crappy code
🛠️ My Expertise
Six ways I move the needle
⚙️
Backend Development
Go, Node, Python. APIs that stay fast even when your user base grows 10x overnight.
🚀
Technical Leadership
Hiring, roadmapping, and trade-off talks. I make the hard calls so your team can move fast.
🌱
Startup Environment
I've been employee #3 twice and #1 once. Lean sprints, scrappy solving, zero bureaucracy.
🏗️
Consulting & Architecture
Audits, system design, and rescue plans. I walk into chaos and leave behind something boring and reliable.
🔁
End-to-End Development
Product definition to CI/CD pipeline. I'm comfortable owning the full lifecycle — and I document everything too.
🎯
Execution Focus
Shipping beats talking. Every sprint ends with something deployed and measurable.
📦 Recent Wins
Getting things done — literally.
2024
FinSight Analytics
Rebuilt a stalled financial reporting API that was 6 months behind. Migrated to event-driven architecture, cut p95 latency from 1.2s to 180ms.
Go
Kafka
Postgres
2023
Nido Health
Led a team of 6 as fractional CTO. Scaled from 2,000 to 50,000 active patients in 8 months without any major outages.
Node
AWS
Terraform
2022
LoopCart
Designed a payment reconciliation system that handled 2M+ transactions/month with zero discrepancies. Saved the company ~$180K/yr in manual audit.
Python
Django
Stripe
💬 Kind Words
People I've built with
★★★★★
"Milo took our backend from 'please don't crash' to 'we brag about it in investor meetings.' He's rare — equally strong at writing code and setting strategy."
Sarah ReyesCEO, FinSight Analytics
★★★★★
"We hired Milo for 6 weeks and kept him for 9 months. He mentored our juniors, shipped our core API, and left documentation we still reference daily."
David KimCTO, Nido Health
📬 Let's Connect
Have a project that needs a strong backend?
I currently have capacity for one new consulting engagement starting next month. Let's talk about what you're building — and what's blocking you.
📝 I also blog occasionally — thoughts on systems & startups
Read the Blog →
📝 From the Blog
Latest thinking
The 3 questions I ask before designing any system
Traffic doesn't matter. Revenue per request does. The practical questions that turn vague startup ideas into boringly stable architecture.
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