Finn Cardiff

Senior Software Engineer · Denver, CO

I build high-throughput backend systems, data pipelines, and the dashboards that watch them. Nine years in, my work has ranged from founding an eCommerce company to scaling a game platform played by millions. These days I keep insurance-scale APIs fast at State Farm.

currently: senior software engineer @ State Farm

Experience

Senior Software Engineer · State Farm

2024-03 → now current

Cut average API response times 70% across 12 critical routes serving 10,000+ daily active users, using Nest.js, PostgreSQL, and TypeScript with concurrent processing.
Led the migration from Basic Auth to Microsoft Azure EntraID across 7 APIs and 25 downstream consumers.
Mentored 4 junior developers through structured code reviews and pair programming, with a 43% improvement in team velocity and shorter review cycles.
Restructured GitLab CI/CD pipelines for automated AWS deployments, cutting deployment time 71%.
Led the mainframe migration from IBM DB2 to PostgreSQL while holding high availability, monitored through custom Dynatrace and Splunk dashboards.

Technical Lead & Architect · coastymade

2021-01 → now current

Grew the player base to 5.7M+ total users, with 1M+ new players monthly, building game systems from scratch in Lua and React.
Built the coastymade community to 750K+ members, growing 30K+ per month.
Designed a custom recommendation algorithm that lifted in-game revenue 463% and retention 37%.
Built a generative-AI content pipeline using a custom model trained on coastymade's game data and hand-authored skill files, producing 3D assets, UI sets, and full game concepts from simple commands, with its output shipped in production.
Architected a data pipeline ingesting 250,000+ daily player data points to drive design decisions, yielding 55% more daily active users and 72% more positive reviews.
Engineered a REST API handling 200K+ requests per day for thousands of concurrent players, on cloud servers behind load balancers.
Led a team of engineers across feature development, bug fixes, and technical code reviews.

Software Engineer, Contract · Consulting

2021-01 → 2024-03

Generated $26M+ in revenue for a high-traffic Shopify storefront with 3M+ monthly visitors, engineering custom product features in Next.js and Sass.
Architected a Node.js/MongoDB backend for an energy-trading startup, managing 1M+ records per hour at 99.99% uptime with 52% faster query performance.
Designed and built internal tools end-to-end for a global asset-management firm, including financial projection tools used daily by its asset managers.
Led a full migration of legacy services to AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda) for a global security-services firm, cutting infrastructure overhead 40% at 99.995% availability.

Founder & Founding Engineer · Beachgoer

2017-01 → 2021-01

Scaled annual revenue from $0 to $750K and sold 54,000 units in a single year on a proprietary Node.js/MongoDB eCommerce platform that automated purchasing decisions.
Built a real-time repricing engine processing 31,000 products every 5 seconds, 55% faster than market competitors, lifting profit margins 25%.
Engineered a high-throughput ingestion system on Amazon SQS microservices handling 11M+ records per hour, supporting 400% year-over-year growth.

Toolbox

ai/: Claude API · OpenAI API · MCP · Model fine-tuning · Generative content pipelines
lang/: Python · Java · TypeScript · JavaScript · SQL · Lua · HTML/CSS
svc/: Node.js · Express · Nest.js · Next.js · React · GraphQL · Tailwind CSS · Flask · MongoDB · PostgreSQL · Redis
test/: Jest · Playwright
infra/: AWS · SQS · GCP · Azure · Docker · Kubernetes · ArgoCD · Terraform · GitLab CI/CD · Dynatrace · Splunk

Contact

The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything.