Charles Lawrence
Senior Backend Engineer at Backbone
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCharles Lawrence is a senior backend engineer and founder with 16 years of experience building scalable web products and APIs from prototype to high-traffic production. He architected and ran getjsonip.com, scaling an IP geolocation API to 1.5 billion monthly requests and delivering a low-cost, low-latency service that supported nearly 1,000 RPS on modest VMs before a successful exit. At Backbone he led vector-search architecture using HNSW and pgvector to boost DAU searches by 60% and eliminated a costly third-party dependency, while also driving Typescript/Postgres refactors and well-tested API features. His background spans full-stack work—from performant React frontends and timelapse media services to deep test automation at Pinterest—showing a rare blend of product-minded engineering and operational efficiency. Based in San Francisco, he contributes open-source UI tooling (creator of jsonip.com and front-end work on Helium CSS) and favors pragmatic, resource-efficient architectures that scale.
16 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at St. Petersburg College
Stackoverflow
41,649reputation
4.8mreached
320answers
215questions
jquery
top-5%
cypress
top-5%
javascript
top-1%
youtube
top-5%
html
top-5%
associative-array
top-1%
Github Skills (20)
javascript10
css10
user-interface10
ui-design10
graphical-user-interface10
html10
associative-array10
testing9
cypress9
jquery9
youtube9
swift6
integration-testing6
ecmascript6
nodejs6
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
geuis/helium-css
Jan 2010 - Jul 2015
Helium - javascript tool to scan your site and show unused CSS
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:26 commits, 1 PR, 3 pushes in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Charles primarily focused on developing the user interface aspects of the Helium CSS project. They implemented features such as report generation, including the ability to download the report. They also updated the CSS styling of the interface, and added the ability to toggle selector visibility, and included style cleanup. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the test environment.
scanunusedheliumcssjavascript
geuis/argon
Mar 2014 - Sep 2015
Contributions:21 commits, 7 pushes, 5 tags in 1 year 7 months
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