Dawei Ma

Senior Full-Stack Engineer / Architect — Cloud & AI

Xi’an, China · CET-friendly hours · Open to relocation (Germany) · Blue Card eligible

github.com/madawei2699 · Blog · [email protected]

Summary

I am a Senior Engineer and Architect with over 10 years of experience building large software services. I lead projects with multiple services, make complex systems stable, and solve unclear problems by creating clear documents and solutions. Recently, I led a project to redesign a notification system and remove an old engine for a large real-estate client, and solved complex infrastructure challenges, enabling security compliance and performance monitoring for a German automotive OEM. I am looking for a job in Germany (or remote in the EU) where I can build reliable systems and quickly adapt to new technologies.

Scale hints: Deployed weekly into a platform with >2 billion monthly PVs, involving 20+ services and zero-downtime releases.

Skills

• Backend/Platform: TypeScript/Node, Python, Kotlin, Clojure; AWS/GCP, Docker, K8s, CI/CD, Terraform
• Frontend: React (+TypeScript)
• Data/AI: BigQuery, event pipelines; Building apps with LLMs
• Areas of Experience: Notification & messaging systems, Lead pipelines, Security scanning (SCA), System monitoring (Observability), Performance & reliability
• Work Practices: System Architecture, Writing technical documents (ADRs), Incident response, Working across teams, AI-assisted Development, Documentation (Mermaid)

Experience

Senior Consultant — Thoughtworks (May 2019–Present)

As a key technical consultant for enterprise clients, I have led teams and solved complex technical challenges. My key projects include:

Large Real-Estate Marketplace in Australia (Remote, Nov 2022–Now)
Stack: TypeScript/Node, React, BigQuery, GCP, Braze, Docker, CI/CD, fp-ts
Scale: ~2 billion monthly page views, ~3,000 requests/second at peak, 20+ microservices

• Owned ad platform features — customer ad purchase interface, ad serving, impression tracking, and reporting pipelines using BigQuery. Integrated with event-driven infrastructure (AWS SQS, internal messaging platforms) to process ad events. Collaborated across teams to deliver features.
• Redesigned notification system — removed legacy MQ system with zero downtime by coordinating multi-team migration. Designed flexible event-based architecture that reduced feature delivery time and improved test coverage.
• Solved production blockers — diagnosed and fixed infrastructure issues (VPC peering, IAM credential propagation) that blocked deployments. Wrote emergency scripts to recover failed user notifications.
• Improved engineering practices — introduced Mermaid for architecture diagrams in ADRs, wrote technical deep-dives for complex data flows, established patterns for working with distributed messaging systems.

Result: Enabled weekly zero-downtime deployments, delivered ad platform features serving thousands of advertisers.

German Car Company (Remote, Jan 2021–Sep 2022)
Stack: Clojure (nginx-clojure), Kotlin/Java, AWS, AppDynamics, Nginx, GoCD, Phrase

• Led the effort to find the cause of random 504 errors, tracking the problem to the AWS infrastructure by testing and collaborating with both infrastructure teams and the open-source author.
• Made it possible to use BlackDuck security scanning for Clojure projects, even though the tool did not support it. The solution was used by all teams in the company.
• Corrected inaccurate system monitoring for Clojure services and improved performance by tuning the web server.
• Contributed a key bug fix to a Kubernetes ecosystem project (Google’s Kaniko), which was approved and merged into the main branch.

Result: We could deliver work on time again. The system became more reliable and secure.

Leading China ICT Company (Apr 2020–Dec 2020)

• As a Senior Backend Developer, I helped build key enterprise platforms using Java and SpringBoot.

Major Airport Advertising Company (Aug 2019–Oct 2019)

• Acted as Tech Lead to guide the team through a backend microservices refactoring.

Senior Java Developer — Yeahmobi (Apr 2018–May 2019)
Stack: Java/Spring Boot, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, AWS, Python

• Built backend platforms for ad campaign management — integrated third-party ad platform APIs (ClickBank, Google Ads API) for campaign creation and reporting. Handled API workflows and data synchronization.
• Developed data pipelines — built web crawlers to collect Twitter data, collaborated with ML team for data classification, deployed processed data to websites to drive traffic.
• Optimized database and caching — improved queries and caching strategies, reducing response time by 50%.

iOS Developer — Fengyu (Apr 2016–Apr 2018)

Founder — Financial Services Startup (2015–2016)

Selected Projects

myInvestPilot (Founder) — An AI tool for investment. I built it myself as a SaaS product. It uses Cloudflare Workers, FastAPI, Supabase (Postgres), and Redis. It runs automatically and has real users.

myGPTReader (Creator) — A popular open-source tool (4,000+ stars on GitHub) for talking with AI bots. It has received contributions from the community.

free4chat — A real-time audio chat app (WebRTC) built with Elixir/Phoenix. I originally wrote it in Go and later rebuilt it in Elixir to explore a language I enjoy.

Writing & Talks

• As an official AWS Community Builder, I publish articles on platforms like dev.to about topics like Kubernetes and Serverless development.
• I also give talks on Generative AI and maintain a personal blog focused on architecture and automation.
• Blog: bmpi.dev

Education

B.E., Computer Science & Technology — North China Electric Power University (2008–2012)

Languages

• English: Professional Working Proficiency
• Mandarin: Native
• German: Willing to learn upon relocation