Robert Chen
Software Engineer at Expensify
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRobert Chen is a seasoned software engineer with 13 years of experience building resilient back-end systems in San Francisco, currently at Expensify where he progressed from Software Developer to long-tenured Engineer. He specializes in distributed systems and database reliability—evidenced by contributions to a rock-solid active/active database project where he refactored checkpointing, masking logic, and operational control commands to improve performance and configurability. His background spans fintech product engineering, scientific research internships (JPL, Scripps, ICHEC), and early-career roles that blend scientific computing with production software. Known for pragmatic, performance-minded changes rather than flashy rewrites, he brings deep systems intuition and a track record of shipping dependable infrastructure at scale.
13 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
University of California San Diego
Russian, Spanish, Chinese, English
Github Skills (11)
databases10
c-language10
database-administration10
sqlite10
cprogramming-language10
admin10
database10
checkpointing9
checkpoint9
system-design8
configuration-management7
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
Expensify/Bedrock
Feb 2017 - Dec 2022
Rock solid distributed database specializing in active/active automatic failover and WAN replication
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:33 releases, 5 reviews, 24 commits in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Robert primarily focused on refactoring and improving the functionality of a database system. Their contributions included removing card-specific functionalities and enhancing the logic for masking card numbers. They also introduced new control commands for managing server behavior and adjusted checkpointing mechanisms. Additionally, the user added a flag to optionally enable checkpoint mode, indicating a focus on system performance and configuration.
rockdistributed-databasedatabasefailoverreplication
fernjager/ircd.go
Apr 2013 - Apr 2013
Contributions:7 commits in 2 days
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