Rixl
A video and media platform other products build on.
Backend software engineer and the largest contributor to its backend. I owned billing, passkey sign-in, authorization policies and canary releases.
- Role
- Software engineer, backend
- Context
- Employer, contract
- Duration
- 16 months
- When
- 2025 to 2026
What I owned
- Billing and subscriptions.
- Passkey sign-in, across the auth service, API and gateway.
- Authorization policies.
- Canary releases, with metrics labelled by cohort so a canary can be judged before rollout.
- Request tracing across the services.
- Subtitle and audio tracks: upload, authoring and processing.
- The authentication layer every service uses to call another.
- The move of the core services to gRPC, and all eight SDKs.
Owned end to end
Billing in the core API
- Stripe checkout and subscriptions
- Usage meters
- Invoices
- Webhooks
- Plan quotas
- Tests
I wrote most of the billing code and its tests.
Impact
The billing and auth code I owned ships in Rixl's public API, 210 operations documented at docs.rixl.com.
When things go wrong
When a transcoding job fails or stalls,
renditions are claimed with row locks and retried with backoff, and a reconciler recovers uploads that stall.
When the SDKs could drift from the API,
the spec is generated from the service definitions, and every change regenerates all eight SDKs.
When one dashboard query gets expensive,
analytics runs as its own ClickHouse service, and each dashboard query has a work limit and a deadline.
Built with
Go, gRPC, PostgreSQL, River, ClickHouse, FFmpeg