Brilian Firdaus

Backend software engineer

Brilian Firdaus

I work on distributed systems, mostly around orders, loyalty, identity, and search. I've spent 8+ years building and operating backend services at Grab and Blibli.

My work includes API performance, cloud migrations, and service reliability. I use Go and the JVM, with PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch.

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Current
GrabTransaction Platform
Experience
8+ yearsBackend engineering
Writing
31 articlesSince 2020
Location
JakartaIndonesia

Selected projects

Backend systems
GrabAPI performance

Cross-sell API latency

Introduced concurrent downstream calls and a bulk caching layer. Reduced p99 latency from 2.5s to 1s, a 60% reduction.

  • Concurrency
  • Caching
Related article: why caching matters
BlibliInfrastructure

Loyalty Platform cloud migration

Led the migration from on-prem infrastructure to GCP across ~20 services. Added support for autoscaling, faster deployments, and improved observability.

  • GCP
  • Cloud migration
BlibliIdentity & access

IAM rewrite and migration to GKE

Co-led the rewrite and migration, scaling throughput to ~5K QPS. Used Redis caching and Resilience4j circuit breakers to improve resilience.

  • GKE
  • Redis
  • Resilience4j
Related article: circuit breakers

Experience

  1. Nov 2024 — Present

    Grab

    Jakarta

    Senior Software Engineer, Backend

    Transaction Platform

    • Launched cash payments for bundled orders as Engineering Owner, adding ~10K daily orders. Diagnosed and fixed a cross-service pricing mismatch for the launch.
    • Designed and launched Live Activity for cross-sell products, contributing ~5% of total cross-sell order volume.
  2. Apr 2018 — Nov 2024

    Blibli

    Jakarta

    Associate to Principal, three promotions

    1. Principal Software Development Engineer

      Oct 2023 — Nov 2024
      • Led Dream On, the high-concurrency raffle system behind the 2023 year-end (12.12) campaign. Issued ~2M unique raffle tickets at peak, with fair, low-latency winner selection.
      • Led unified membership integration in the Loyalty Platform, consolidating identity and loyalty across 3 group entities.

    2. Senior Staff Software Engineer

      Mar 2021 — Sep 2023
      • Co-led a 5-engineer team on phone number registration, generating ~100K new user registrations per month.
      • Designed a webhook platform for the Loyalty Platform, delivering events to internal and external consumers at least once through Kafka retry topics and a dead-letter queue.
      • Built an incident management platform adopted across engineering teams to centralize incident coordination (write-up).

    3. Associate → Staff Software Engineer

      Apr 2018 — Feb 2021
      • Built event-driven search for ticket, voucher, and hotel products on Elasticsearch. Improved hotel search relevance by replacing Google-based location data with offline datasets and fuzzy search.

Writing

All articles

Building Your First LLM Career Assistant: A Beginner's Guide

Building a chatbot with Python, FastAPI, and the OpenAI API.

Mastering Race Conditions: Strategies for Reliable Software Systems

Concurrency, shared state, and handling race conditions.

A Developer’s Guide to Circuit Breakers: Protect Your Service from Failure

Handling downstream failures in distributed systems.

Contact

brilian (at) brilianfirdaus (dot) comLinkedIn