Gideon Whitlaw
Backend engineer, Kotlin and Spring Boot, Kafka and PostgreSQL
Kansas City, MOgideon.whitlaw@example.com(555) 519-2640gideonwhitlaw.example.com
Summary
Backend engineer with a BS in Computer Science and two years on the telemetry team at a fleet software company tracking 48,000 trucks. Builds Kotlin services on Kafka and PostgreSQL and owns the trip-summary API that dispatch screens call 2M times a day.
Experience
Software engineer I, backend
Jun 2024 – Present
Westport Fleet Telematics · Kansas City, MO
- Built the trip-summary API in Kotlin and Spring Boot that dispatch screens call 2M times a day, holding p99 latency under 180 ms.
- Implemented idempotent Kafka consumers in GPS ingestion, ending duplicate trip records that had affected 3% of daily trips.
- Designed a partitioned PostgreSQL table for 900M location points a month, cutting the nightly report query from 14 minutes to 40 seconds.
- Resolved 94% of pages inside the 30-minute acknowledgment target across 5 on-call weeks, and wrote runbooks for the 4 noisiest alerts.
Backend engineering intern
May 2023 – Aug 2023
Armourdale Mutual Insurance · Kansas City, MO
- Built a Spring Boot endpoint that serves policy documents to 60,000 customers, with contract tests against its OpenAPI spec.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Aug 2020 – May 2024
Missouri Plains University · Kansas City, MO
Skills
- Languages
- Kotlin, Java, SQL
- Services
- Spring Boot, REST API
- Data
- PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka
- Platform
- Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD





