Software Engineer III · Los Angeles, CA

I build data platforms that carry millions of requests a week.

I'm a Software Engineer III at American Express, where I design, plan, and build high-throughput backends and carry them from dev and QA all the way to production. I hold a B.S. in Computer Science from UC Irvine and I'm working toward my M.S. at Georgia Tech. I spend my other hours teaching the next set of developers.

View my resume GitHub

whoami.json

{
  "name": "Nicholas Kachami",
  "role": "Software Engineer III",
  "company": "American Express",
  "location": "Los Angeles, California",
  "focus": [
    "engineering excellence",
    "data platforms",
    "developer education"
  ],
  "stack": ["java", "python", "elasticsearch", "and more :D"]
}

5+ yrs: building backend platforms
4 roles: intern to Software Engineer III on the same team
Zero: customer-impacting incidents since platform launch
Dozens of teams: teams across the enterprise build on what I ship

What I work on

High-throughput backends

Mission-critical Java services in the critical path of the customer experience, plus event-driven pipelines carrying high daily volumes from a NoSQL store of record, through a message bus, into Elasticsearch.

End-to-end ownership

Product design, implementation, and quality assurance handled single-handedly — self-service message bus infrastructure, GitHub Actions pipelines, and containerized integration suites, alongside LLM-backed search and log-analysis agents for the engineers on my platform.

Teaching and mentorship

Five years designing Python and boolean-algebra curricula from scratch for students ages 10–18, and mentoring junior engineers into higher-scope work at Amex.

The stack I reach for

Area	Day to day	Also work with
Languages	Java, Python, SQL	Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bash
Backend	Vert.x, Spring	REST, GraphQL
Data and streaming	Elasticsearch, Kafka	OpenSearch, NoSQL stores
Infrastructure	Docker, Kubernetes, GCP	GitHub Actions, Maven, Artifactory
Testing and quality	Testcontainers, JMeter	SonarQube, CI/CD test gates
Observability	OpenTelemetry	OpenSearch log analysis

The full list lives on my resume, served straight from this site's Go API.

Want the full picture?

Roles, projects, open source, and the systems behind them — or reach out directly if you'd rather just talk.

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