Hannah Connolly

Backend Software Engineer · New York, NY

I build APIs that keep data consistent at scale.

I'm a backend engineer working mostly in Python and TypeScript. At BentoBox I built payment and point-of-sale integrations for more than 5,000 restaurants, and at American Express I moved customer acquisition APIs from REST to GraphQL. Lately I've been building event-driven systems on AWS and contributing to Replay Manager for Slippi, an open-source tournament tool.

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Data updates synced monthly
10M+
Restaurants served
5,000+
Customer accounts on a unified schema
20M+
Lower API latency
40%

Experience

Jun 2022 – Feb 2023

Software Engineer, Backend BentoBox

  • Built a Django API for Fiserv gift card purchases and redemptions, supporting over 50,000 transactions per month across all BentoBox locations.
  • Engineered a synchronization engine that processed over 10 million data updates monthly across five POS systems, ensuring sub-second data consistency for 5,000+ restaurants.
  • Implemented a catering integration with Clover POS, enabling seamless ordering and supporting over 10,000 monthly transactions.
  • Designed microservices tailored to each POS system, ensuring a consistent user experience for over 5,000 restaurants.
May 2021 – May 2022

Software Engineer, Backend American Express

  • Optimized customer acquisition APIs by implementing GraphQL persisted queries and server-side caching in JavaScript, reducing data retrieval latency by 40% for millions of monthly interactions.
  • Designed a unified data schema for over 20 million customer accounts and led the migration of backend APIs onto it, replacing the legacy REST endpoints.
Jun 2020 – Aug 2020

Software Engineer Intern, Backend American Express

  • Built a backend tool that automatically generates API schemas from existing REST endpoints.
  • Modernized APIs by architecting and deploying components that integrate with a modern query language system.

Projects

2026 · Personal project

Plant AI: IoT plant monitor on AWS

PythonRaspberry PiIoT CoreLambdaDynamoDBS3

  • Built a Raspberry Pi plant monitor in Python logging hourly climate data and daily photos.
  • Streamed sensor data to AWS IoT Core over MQTT using X.509 certificate authentication, and routed it through an IoT Rule into DynamoDB, with keys designed for time-range queries.
  • Moved Gemini image analysis to an event-driven AWS Lambda triggered by S3 photo uploads. It queries 24 hours of readings from DynamoDB, loads secrets from SSM Parameter Store, and retries when the API is rate-limited.
Hourly
  1. DHT11 sensor
  2. Raspberry Pi
  3. IoT Core (MQTT)
  4. IoT Rule
  5. DynamoDB
Daily
  1. Webcam photo
  2. S3
  3. Lambda
  4. Gemini analysis
  5. Discord report

2026 · Open-source contribution

Replay Manager for Slippi

GraphQLstart.gg APIOpen source

Merged pull request #167

  • Contributed start.gg GraphQL mutations to an open-source tournament tool, automating set calling and set progress tracking for organizers.
  • The tool is used at events with 1,000+ entrants and up to 100,000 concurrent stream viewers.

More on GitHub

nycmelee-homepage Community site for NYC Melee. I contributed 10 merged pull requests, including start.gg event data on the home page, the navbar, and CI formatting checks. Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind piMTA Heads-up display of real-time train arrivals at a local station, read from GTFS-RT feeds and shown in a terminal or on a Raspberry Pi e-paper HAT. Python · Raspberry Pi · GTFS-RT TO-bot Discord bot that reminds tournament organizers of their weekly tasks, such as posting registration links and sharing schedules. Python · Discord Tournament-Organizer-Rotation Command-line tool that generates a two-month rotating weekly schedule for tournament organizers, using only the Python standard library. Python · CLI trackmania-name-gen Web tool for building colored, styled Trackmania usernames, with a real-time preview and one-click copy. Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind pokemon-birthday Maps a birthday to a Pokémon and shows its details from the public PokéAPI. This one links to the live demo. React · TypeScript · Vite

All repositories on GitHub

Community

Mar 2023 – Present

Head Event Organizer New York City Melee

  • Led weekly NYC Melee tournaments (80–120 players), boosting attendance by ~30% per year.
  • Directed a 1,000-entrant international annual tournament in Toronto, managing cross-border travel, venue negotiations, multi-day scheduling, and a 30-person volunteer team.

Skills

Languages
PythonJavaScript / TypeScriptJavaSQLCC++C#
Backend
DjangoGraphQLRESTNodeExpressReact
Cloud & ops
AWS LambdaS3DynamoDBIoT CoreIAMKubernetesDatadog
AI
GenAIClaude

Education

B.S. Software Engineering, Arizona State University, Mesa, AZ · May 2021

Contact

Looking for a backend engineer? I'd like to hear about it.

github.com/HannahConnolly linkedin.com/in/hannahconn