Rafael Chacón
About
Software Engineer with more than 14 years of experience. I have worked on Infrastructure at multiple companies during hyper growth periods. Helped them scale, while also expanding the bussiness. More recently, working again in product engineering at Figma.
Experience
Figma
October 2022 - Current
Software Engineer
Slack Technologies
July 2017 - Nov 2022
Staff Software Engineer
- Re-architected Slack’s core online database system and migrated it to Vitess to support business rapid growth. Over this period, traffic to the database tier increased by 10x over 18 months. Impact of this work is documented in this blog post and this talk.
- Lead migration that unified and simplified Slack’s online database platform by migrating a fleet of more than a 1000 MySQL clusters into Vitess. The migration was achieved with zero downtime and transparently to application developers. Presented this work at Kube-Con2020.
- Set up the foundations that consolidated Vitess as the canonical database solution at Slack. This work was instrumental to keep up with product demands in a scalable and reliable way. Some projects that were part of these efforts: enabled product teams to use Vitess effectively, built migration frameworks, performed table migrations, enhanced Vitess to support Slack needs.
- Vitess maintainer - Implemented and enhanced multiple features in Vitess core components: cluster management, VReplication, query service, topology, etc.
MyFitnessPal
January 2014 - July 2017
Lead Software Engineer
- Lead team that implemented and deployed a consolidated payments platform for both MapMyFitness and MyFitnessPal aimed to simplify accounting and revenue metrics tracking. At the time, this system handled millions of dollars per year in transactions.
- Solved engineering growth challenges of a platform that went from 40 Million users to 100 Million users in one year. The overall success of the app led to the acquisition of MyFitnessPal by Under Armour for $475 million.
Skyscraper
January 2014 - July 2017
Lead Software Engineer
- First engineer and full stack application engineer for a startup generating revenue for bloggers.
Noomii
January 2014 - July 2017
Lead Software Engineer
- Full stack application engineer for coach directory.