I'm Keith Ward, a Senior Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience specializing in backend systems, API design, and performance optimization. I work primarily with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL, and I’m passionate about building reliable, scalable systems that power real-world experiences at scale.

• 💻 Ruby & Ruby on Rails: Deep experience architecting and maintaining backend services, APIs, and background jobs in production systems.
• 🛰 Real-Time Systems: Maintain real-time delivery tracking platforms using PostgreSQL, GraphQL, and Rails, supporting live driver location updates and customer notifications.
• 🛠 Performance Tuning: Diagnose and resolve bottlenecks by analyzing logs, metrics, and traces; restructure queries, add indexes, and optimize data flows in PostgreSQL.
• 📈 Observability & Reliability: Enhance system visibility using Datadog (metrics, SLOs/SLIs) and Sumo Logic (logs); maintain high uptime and responsiveness through robust monitoring.
• 🧱 Architecture & RFCs: Lead discovery, write RFCs, and scope technical work for architectural and performance-critical improvements across microservices.
• 👥 Cross-Team Mentorship: Share performance best practices in code reviews and design discussions, especially around Rails, SQL, and background job patterns.
• 🔁 On-Call & Incident Response: Support production systems through on-call rotations, leading incident response and contributing to postmortems and disaster recovery planning.
• ⚙️ Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, GraphQL, Kafka, Zeebe, Python, Kubernetes, Datadog, Sumo Logic

• 🚚 Real-Time Delivery Systems: Built and maintained high-throughput backend services for delivery tracking, including driver location pipelines and customer delivery status updates.
• 🧪 Performance Engineering: Drove company-wide performance improvements by identifying critical slow paths, tuning indexes, and optimizing data models and queries.
• 🛠️ Distributed Systems & Observability: Worked across microservices on a Kubernetes platform, integrating monitoring and alerting to support scaling and reliability at high traffic volumes.

I'm passionate about backend performance, distributed systems, and clean, scalable architecture. I enjoy debugging hard problems, learning new tools, and collaborating across teams to ship better software.

Open to collaboration, performance optimization challenges, or just swapping ideas. Reach out on GitHub or connect via LinkedIn.