90%
Less build time
Privacy compliance pipelines
Standardized CCPA-compliant data handling at Sam's Club, so new compliance workflows ship in a tenth of the time.
Software & Data Engineer · Bentonville, AR
Samuel Taylor
I build large-scale distributed backend systems: ad serving, retail analytics, privacy compliance and in-club operations at Sam's Club. Before that, eleven years shipping games on Roblox.
- Now
- Senior Software Engineer, In-Club Systems at Sam's Club
- Leading
- Inventory, asset protection and backroom receiving
- Stack
- Java, Go, Python, TypeScript · Kafka · PostgreSQL · Kubernetes
- Scale
- Retail ad serving and analytics; Roblox titles with 80M+ players
- Based
- Bentonville, Arkansas
At a glance
- 80M+players across Roblox titles I built
- 90%less time to build new privacy compliance workflows
- 20%ad revenue lift from audience-building work
- 11 yrsof independent game development
About
Software and data engineer with three-plus years of experience building large-scale, distributed backend systems at Sam's Club. I'm comfortable across the stack, from API and batch design to CI/CD and observability, and I like automating, optimizing and scaling whatever is in front of me.
I taught myself to code by building games, and I still do. I'm currently leading the team behind in-club systems for inventory, asset protection and backroom receiving.
Selected work
+20%
Ad revenue
Real-time audience targeting
Kafka event ingestion and large-scale segment computation behind retargeting, with sub-second answers on high-volume queries.
+60%
Player retention
Space Battlegrounds
Greenfield gameplay systems on Roblox, led as founding engineer. Post-launch issues fell 30% and the dev cycle shrank 85%.
80M+
Players reached
Roblox backend stack
Luau and Knit on the client, a custom REST API on PostgreSQL, Express and S3 behind it, with Go load testing and composite-index tuning.
Experience
Jul 2026 – Present
Senior Software Engineer, In-Club Systems
Sam's Club (Walmart Inc.) · Bentonville, AR
- Lead a team of engineers building associate-facing systems for inventory management, asset protection and backroom receiving.
- Own technical direction and delivery for operational tooling used daily by in-club associates, balancing reliability and usability at retail scale.
- Set engineering standards and mentor the team on service design, deployment practices and on-call ownership.
Jul 2025 – Jul 2026
Software, Data and Frontend Engineer
Sam's Club · Consumer Compliance & Ad Serving
- Implemented standardized, CCPA-compliant privacy data pipelines, cutting development time on new compliance workflows by 90%.
- Partnered on the architecture of next-generation offsite ad serving, enabling multi-channel revenue growth on high-throughput, fault-tolerant services.
- Contributed to a high-performance reporting platform on cloud-native data infrastructure that kept Sam's Club a best-in-class retail analytics provider.
- Designed RESTful interfaces and batch jobs for downstream analytics, partner integrations and audience activation.
Jul 2024 – Jul 2025
Software and Data Engineer
Sam's Club · Audience Building
- Led API and batch development for real-time ad targeting and retargeting, including Kafka event ingestion and large-scale segment computation.
- Helped lift ad-serving revenue 20% across in-store, onsite and offsite advertising.
- Tuned schema design, indexing and caching to deliver sub-second responses on high-volume audience queries.
- Worked with partner, platform and ML teams to integrate new technology into live services with minimal downtime.
Mar 2023 – May 2024
Founding Engineer
Timecraft Studios · Remote
- Led greenfield front- and back-end gameplay development for Space Battlegrounds on Roblox, cutting development time by 50%.
- Led a team of engineers, reducing development cycle time by 85% and improving code-review throughput.
- Drove technical decisions behind a 30% drop in post-launch issues and a 60% boost in player retention.
2022 – 2024
Earlier engineering and research
Main Street, Inc. · Fetch Rewards · University of Alabama at Birmingham
- Built features in C#, Blazor, ASP.NET and Entity Framework for internal machinery and customer-facing web apps at Main Street (2023).
- Shipped backend features in Go and database layers as a systems architect apprentice at Fetch Rewards (2022–2023).
- Research at UAB on algorithms, systems and applied computing, and on quantum mechanics and theoretical mathematics (2023–2024).
Jan 2012 – Dec 2022
Independent Game Developer
Roblox platform · Contract & personal
- Designed, built and shipped contracted and original games with titles collectively reaching 80M+ players.
- Architected gameplay systems, client/server networking, persistence layers and live-ops infrastructure across an 11-year run.
- Owned the full cycle: concept, scripting, deployment, monetization and post-launch iteration in Luau and adjacent backend stacks.
Skills
- Languages
- JavaC#PythonGoSQLLuauJavaScript / TypeScript
- Frameworks & services
- SpringHibernateJava EERESTKafkaASP.NETEntity FrameworkExpress
- Distributed systems
- Fault toleranceScalabilityCachingReal-time processingBatch pipelines
- Cloud & DevOps
- AzureGCPAWSKubernetesDockerJenkinsCI/CDSplunk
- Data stores
- PostgreSQLCassandraElasticsearchMongoDBRedis
- Foundations
- AlgorithmsSystems designOOPApplied mathematics
Contact
I'm always up for talking about distributed systems, data engineering or games. The best way to reach me is email.