Lee Linkoff
Systems Platform Engineering • AI and LLM Integration • Distributed Systems

Engineering Leader building mission-critical production platforms

Platform prototypes, shipped systems, and real production platforms.

Engineering Leadership – Platform Architecture and Distributed Systems

I design and build production-grade platform architectures including APIs, distributed services, AI RAG platforms, and analytics pipelines.

I own platform architecture, production stability, security boundaries, and delivery execution. I define service contracts, establish API boundaries, model failure scenarios, and validate scaling behavior under load. My focus is high-volume backend systems where uptime, data integrity, and blast-radius control matter more than feature velocity.

I lead senior engineers and engineering teams while remaining embedded in system architecture and production behavior. I drive architectural decisions, review critical implementation paths, resolve production failure modes, and ensure deployment readiness before systems go live. I am accountable for how systems behave in production.

My work includes mission-critical and revenue-impacting platforms built on Java (Spring Boot), .NET, Python, and Node.js within cloud-native architectures, with modern frontend experience (React, Vue), deployed on AWS using Docker and Kubernetes with strong observability, authentication boundaries, API gateway design, and disciplined production operations, focused on solving system problems rather than chasing specific stacks.

Engineering leadership with hands-on architectural authority across platform design, security posture, reliability engineering, and production systems.

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Platform architecture systems APIs and backend engineering Production platform experience

Skills

Security and Adversarial Systems

  • API security boundary analysis and access control validation
  • Authentication and authorization design (token-based, session, identity boundaries)
  • Threat modeling and failure-mode analysis under adversarial conditions
  • Detection of automation abuse, fraud patterns, and system manipulation
  • Request validation, input trust boundaries, and exploit surface analysis

Testing and Validation

  • Deterministic system validation and reproducible test execution
  • Black-box testing of APIs and distributed services
  • Concurrency and race-condition validation
  • Failure injection and edge-case scenario testing
  • Evidence capture, diagnostics, and test result traceability

Core Engineering Capabilities

  • Systems platform engineering, AI RAG platform engineering, and distributed system architecture
  • High-availability and failure-tolerant system design
  • API contract design and service interface definition
  • Production reliability and operational readiness
  • Performance modeling, scaling analysis, and blast-radius control

Implementation and Systems Work

  • Java (Spring Boot, JVM-based backend services)
  • C#/.NET (backend services, platform and enterprise systems)
  • Python (automation, data processing, platform tooling)
  • JavaScript and TypeScript (service integration and control UIs)
  • Backend service implementation for high-volume systems

Platform and Infrastructure

  • Linux-based production systems
  • Containerized deployment using Docker
  • AWS-based cloud infrastructure
  • CI/CD pipelines and release workflows
  • Observability, logging, metrics, and diagnostics

Data and Integration

  • Relational databases and data modeling
  • Analytics instrumentation pipelines
  • Asynchronous and message-based processing
  • Legacy system integration and modernization

Portfolio

Live production systems and platform architecture work. Production platforms built under contract exist inside closed or authenticated environments and cannot be publicly linked.

405d Website

Production platform supporting a federal healthcare cybersecurity program, built to meet government security, reliability, and operational compliance requirements. Source code is private due to contract restrictions.

Open platform system

AI RAG Platform System

Reference implementation of a deterministic, citation-constrained retrieval-augmented generation system with in-memory vector indexing, cosine similarity ranking, and browser-visible source verification.

Open live

ESP32 Relay Firmware (Waveshare)

The stock Waveshare firmware works for demos, but assumes ideal power delivery, permissive BLE control, and continuous polling loops. Under real relay load this can result in watchdog resets, brownouts, and unauthenticated control paths.

This project is an independent ESP32 firmware implementation focused on authenticated BLE commands, deterministic FreeRTOS task structure, controlled logging, and power-aware behavior on constrained hardware.

Derived from publicly released Waveshare example code and maintained independently as an engineering-focused hardening effort.

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Site Uptime Monitor

External uptime monitoring system with stateful alerting and no commercial dependency.

Built on GitHub Actions as a deliberate architectural choice — runs on infrastructure completely independent of the hosting provider. If the host goes down, the monitor still runs. No commercial service dependency means no pricing changes, no vendor risk, and no single point of failure shared with the monitored system.

Implements stateful alerting with state branch persistence, repeat down notifications, single recovery alert, and dual notification delivery via email and ntfy.

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In Development

Active design and build work across multiple platform systems.

  • API Exploit Validator — Black-box API vulnerability validation framework. Deterministic request execution, structured evidence capture, reproducible exploit verification. Initial module development in progress.
  • Platform Framework — Security and integrity layer for high-volume transaction platforms. Behavioral pattern modeling, timing analysis, request correlation, identity boundary enforcement. Architecture design in progress.
  • In-Product Issue Reporting System — Lightweight issue reporting embedded at application error states. Captures execution context and request metadata at the moment of failure. Design in progress.
  • Document Change Service — Authoritative document versioning with immutable identifiers, complete audit trails, and API access for compliance and operational review. Design ready.

Writing

Technical analysis and engineering perspectives. View essays

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