Experience
ClipStake
Founding Engineer
Overview:
- Backend Architect & Founding Engineer at ClipStake ( AllianceDAO-backed), a Solana-based creator economy platform that rewards creators for the views they drive.
- Designing and scaling the infrastructure behind campaign disbursements, video analytics pipelines, and the systems that keep it all reliable under load.
Key Responsibilities:
- Architecting and scaling the backend powering campaign payouts to creators.
- Building the view tracking & video analytics pipelines that measure creator performance.
- Integrating YouTube, Instagram & X for video verification and view tracking.
- Leading the v2 revamp of the platform, end to end across product and infrastructure.
Skills Acquired:
- Building a full stack app using NextJS, Typescript & TailwindCSS
- Working with Supabase (Postgres), AWS & Vercel to power and optimize the platform.
- Handling crypto-based transactions and disbursements on Solana using Privy for wallets & auth.
- Designing video verification & view tracking services that hold up under real-world load.
View Tracking v1:
- Architected a serverless view tracking service on tRPC + SST (AWS Lambda, SQS, DynamoDB) that ingests video URLs and reliably tracks view counts & engagement across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube & X.
- Designed a Smart Router that fans submissions out through platform-specific scraper chains with automatic failover between BrightData & RapidAPI.
- Built a two-layer failure strategy: exponential-backoff retries for transient errors, and a DynamoDB Stream-driven fallback chain for permanent failures, eliminating CRON wait time.
- Implemented distributed, DynamoDB-based rate limiting that coordinates across Lambda instances to stay within third-party API limits.
- Added dynamic update intervals (2hr → 6hr → 12hr → 24hr) that scale tracking frequency with submission age to cut scraping costs, plus per-attempt cost tracking.
- Wired up async webhook correlation with 30-min timeout detection and full observability via DynamoDB, Axiom & CloudWatch.
- Published the @clipstake/view-tracking NPM client for type-safe React/Next.js integration.
ClipStake v1:
- Built the payments layer that powers campaign disbursements on Solana.
- Engineered atomic Solana transactions that bundle the platform fee, affiliate commission and creator payout into a single VersionedTransaction, so every disbursement settles all-or-nothing.
- Supported both native SOL and SPL token payouts — handling lamport/token math and auto-creating associated token accounts when missing.
- Used a master wallet as fee payer for gas sponsorship while Privy embedded campaign wallets co-sign, with confirmation polling on every transaction.
- Made payouts safe to retry with idempotency keys to prevent double-disbursement.
ClipStake v2 (Bedrock):
- Architected the entire v2 rebuild from the ground up as a Turborepo monorepo — a shared tRPC v11 API, Drizzle + Postgres data layer, and Better Auth powering both a Next.js 16 web app and an Expo mobile app from one type-safe codebase.
- Replaced the on-chain payout flow with a SideShift integration — building a dedicated @bedrock/payments package with a typed SideShift client for account creation, balances, transfers and batch transfers, fully validated with Zod schemas.
- Designed a double-entry ledger in Postgres — a campaign-scoped campaign_transaction ledger (budget transfers in, platform fees out, creator payouts, brand withdrawals) and a user-scoped wallet_transaction ledger, with rows transitioning pending → confirmed only once the matching webhook lands.
- Built the SideShift webhook pipeline end to end — HMAC signature verification with timing-safe comparison, a discriminated-union event parser for deposit.confirmed & transfer.completed, and a dispatcher that finalizes the corresponding ledger rows and payouts.
- Made webhook processing idempotent with a webhook_event dedupe table (insert-on-conflict-do-nothing on provider + event id), so SideShift retries are safe no-ops and partially-failed deliveries re-run to completion.
- Correlated async transfers back to their ledger rows by round-tripping a campaignTransactionId through SideShift's transfer metadata, with attempt keys and per-attempt unique constraints giving belt-and-suspenders idempotency across React-Query retries.
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