Halden Ross
I’m Halden Ross. For 16 years I’ve built and run backend systems — payments, marketplaces, data pipelines — and for the last 11 I’ve done it independently, as a contract engineer companies bring in when something has to ship or has to stay up.
I started shipping software in 2009 and spent my early career as a senior, then staff engineer at a payments platform, a logistics marketplace, and an observability startup — the kind of places where an outage is measured in dollars per minute. I went independent in 2014 because I liked the hard, finite problems best: the launch that has to hold, the integration that keeps breaking, the architecture call a team can’t un-make later. I work remotely from Colorado, overlap with US and European mornings, and take one or two engagements at a time so each one gets a staff engineer’s full attention.
Previously: senior & staff engineering at a payments platform, a logistics marketplace, and an observability startup.
Boring technology is a feature. The goal is a system your team can run, debug, and afford — not one that impresses other engineers.
Measure, then move. I don’t guess at bottlenecks; I load-test, trace, and show you the before/after numbers.
Leave it better and leave it owned. I document, hand off, and make myself unnecessary. No key-person risk, no lock-in.
- 2009Started shippingFirst production systems as a backend engineer at an early-stage startup.
- 2012Senior → staff at a payments platformOwned core ledger and reliability for a system moving real money at scale.
- 2014Went independentStarted taking contract engagements — builds, scale work, and advisory.
- 2018Open-sourced queuefall & tracehoundTools from the trenches: a Postgres job queue and OTel sampling middleware.
- 2021Fractional CTO workBegan advising early-stage teams on architecture, hiring, and roadmaps.
- 2025100+ engagements shippedFrom 0→1 builds to launch-saving reliability work across fintech, logistics, and SaaS.
A tiny, dependable job queue on Postgres — outbox pattern, idempotency, and at-least-once delivery without Kafka.
Define SLOs and error budgets as code; generates Grafana dashboards and burn-rate alerts.
OpenTelemetry sampling middleware that keeps the traces that matter and drops the rest.
Reproducible Postgres benchmarking harness for finding the query that’s actually slow.
Illustrative open-source for this template; a live GitHub feed is a backend feature.