Julian Miller

A staff engineer focused on building scalable systems that solve real human problems.

Selected work

A handful of projects spanning games, tools, and infrastructure.

Education B.Sc. (Hons) Computer Science, High Honors ("speedrun" edition)
Focus Distributed Systems  ·  Backend  ·  IAM/Security  ·  Cloud & AI
Stack
Go Python gRPC SQL Redis Kafka Prometheus Grafana Tracing Kubernetes Cursor / Claude

I spent a lot of my childhood modding video games with my friends - basically breaking things just to see if I could put them back together in a more interesting way. Despite always being fascinated by computers and technology, I started university with the intention of becoming a medical doctor. Two years into human anatomy labs and medical ethics, I took a C++ elective on a whim. Building applications reminded me of the joy I had modding games, and I was hooked.

Cramming a CS degree into my original graduation timeline was an intense sprint (yes, summer school was involved), but it gave me a perspective I've kept ever since: I care just as much about the people using the systems as the systems themselves. I still look at software through the lens of human empathy and ethics I picked up in those medical labs, because software is only as good as the human problems it actually solves.

Since taking that C++ course, I’ve been involved in everything from vaccine bioinformatics and diffraction grating modeling with CERN to shipping AAA games and AI agents. Today, I realize debugging a distributed system is surprisingly similar to surgery, just with less anesthesia and more "Undo" buttons.

When I'm not building large-scale distributed systems, you might find me chasing delicious food, playing the drums and piano, or learning something new about the stars.

The Moon The Moon shot through my telescope. Fun fact: toward the top left is the Tycho impact crater. It's about 108 million years old and 85km (53mi) across | XT8 1200mm f/5.9 | 35mm | captured via P3 4.44mm ISO91
Jupiter Jupiter and moons Europa, Ganymede, and Io | XT8 1200mm f/5.9 | 9mm + 2x Barlow | captured via P3 4.44mm ISO91
Saturn Not as detailed as photos from Hubble, but there's something about seeing light reflected by Saturn's rings with your own eyes | XT8 1200mm f/5.9 | 9mm + 2x Barlow | captured via P3 4.44mm ISO91
Pleiades Pleiades / Seven Sisters (M45) star cluster: 100 million years old and about 400 light-years away! | XT8 1200mm f/5.9 | 35mm | captured via P8 6.90mm ISO16340
??? Bonus photo: 🗼 this ramen in Shinjuku no longer exists because I ate it. I really like food.