Principal Backend Engineer, Cloud Cost & Database Scaling

Linas Valiukas is a Lead/Staff Backend Engineer with 15+ years of experience, specializing in reducing cloud costs, scaling large databases, and debugging systems at the syscall level. He has a proven track record of significant achievements, including saving $500k/year at Automattic by reducing S3 storage costs by 75% for a 2 PB dataset, achieving a 26x performance increase by architecting a bespoke binary protocol for WordPress restores, and managing a 30 TB+ PostgreSQL cluster (Citus) and NLP pipelines for MIT/Harvard for 10 years. He also solo-founded aero.zip, a privacy-first file transfer service with E2E encryption and OPAQUE authentication. Linas is adept at debugging complex systems like GnuPG with strace, migrating petabytes without downtime, and replacing brittle Cron jobs with robust workflow systems, actively seeking complex backend challenges.