Tanner Hickey
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AVAILABLE FOR SENIOR ENGINEERING ROLES
Senior Software Engineer with 10 years of experience building scalable systems at Reddit, Klaviyo, Google, and DataBackfill. Specialist in conversational AI, LLM orchestration, and high-throughput data pipelines using GCP.
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SYSTEM
LIVE
role
Senior Software Engineer
org
DataBackfill
scope
1.8M+ monthly convos
stack
Vertex AI · BigQuery · Go
side
Google Search AI Ranking
based
San Antonio, TX
uptime
PLATFORM AVAILABILITY
LATENCY IMPROVEMENT
DAU SUPPORTED
COST REDUCTION PER CONVO
01 / SELECTED WORK
All projects
→
01
Led architecture for a multi-agent AI system serving 1.8M+ monthly conversations. Implemented hybrid RAG with vector search and re-ranking, boosting intent accuracy to 93%.
DATABACKFILL · 2024—2026
02
Owned core ranking and retrieval components for Google Search. Improved suggestion relevance by 31% and click-through rates by 19% for 150M+ daily active users.
GOOGLE · 2020—2024
03
Engineered event-driven pipelines using Kafka that processed billions of monthly events, enabling personalized marketing journeys and cutting message latency to under 12 seconds.
KLAVIYO · 2017—2020
02 / WHAT I WORK ON
Building reliable agentic systems using LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and model routing. I focus on evaluation frameworks that reduce hallucinations and ensure production guardrails.
LangChain
Vertex AI
RAG
Prompt Engineering
Developing high-throughput pipelines that process events at scale. Expertise in Apache Beam, BigQuery, and Kafka to maintain low-latency feature stores and real-time data insights.
BigQuery
Dataflow
Kafka
SQL
Designing distributed systems that handle millions of requests while meeting strict p95 latency budgets. Focused on end-to-end reliability, observability, and cost-efficient scaling.
Kubernetes
Go
Python
Terraform
Open to senior backend and AI engineering roles.
Tanner Hickey
Senior Software Engineer · San Antonio, TX
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© 2026 — Built by Tanner Hickey
Open to new engineering opportunities
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