Hi, I'm Youhyun Kim.
I design and build large-scale backend systems — the kind that stay online when a server doesn't. 10+ years in the startup world, taking projects from a blank whiteboard to production, and keeping them running.
Systems that are built to survive contact with reality.
I work across the full lifecycle — design, build, ship, operate — with a focus on the backend systems that everything else depends on.
System design & architecture
I design distributed systems from the ground up — service boundaries, data flow, and failure modes — before a line of code gets written.
High availability & failover
Redundancy, health checks, and automatic failover are part of the architecture, not an afterthought — systems built to stay up when something breaks.
Full project ownership
I carry projects from the first design doc through production and beyond — architecture, implementation, deployment, and the pager.
Data & video pipelines
From backend APIs to ETL/analytics pipelines to large-scale video processing, I build the systems that move and transform data at scale.
Technologies I build with.
Mostly on AWS and GCP, across a mix of languages and stacks, depending on what the problem actually needs.