Austin Luu, Developer in Oakland, CA, United States
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Austin Luu

Verified Expert  in Engineering

IBM SoftLayer Developer

Location
Oakland, CA, United States
Toptal Member Since
January 19, 2018

Austin is a software and systems engineer experienced in developing Cloud management software with an emphasis on migration, disaster recovery, auto-scaling, and DevOps features. He is proficient in many languages and has expertise throughout the tech stack.

Portfolio

Square
JavaScript, React, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Java
15 Seconds of Fame
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Octopus Deploy, Jira, Git, Windows, Azure...
RackWare, Inc.
C++, Python

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

CentOS, Linux, MacOS, Windows

The most amazing...

...project I've developed is a feature to automatically provision a new server based on weighted specs for disaster recovery or autoscaling.

Work Experience

Software Engineer

2019 - PRESENT
Square
  • Designed and developed services and infrastructure to support communications throughout Square, which includes SMS, email, push and in-app notifications.
  • Developed and maintained complex application services on distributed systems. Designed APIs, databases, and front-end UIs for numerous services.
  • Collected and maintained metrics throughout different communication services, using it to train machine learning models for more intelligent communication. Managed data sets in BigQuery, Looker, and Snowflake.
  • Designed and created a new communications platform using Java, Ruby, and JavaScript: a central platform to facilitate communication between internal product teams and Square merchants, while adhering to rules and standards of the company.
  • Collaborated with internal product teams and merchants to create the best messaging experience for recipients. Designed the different types of possible messages, formats, necessary and optional fields, and how it gets rendered in the client.
  • Designed and created the front-end service for the communications platform in React with a Ruby on Rails back-end. This UI is used by internal product teams to design templates messages as well as rendering previews in specific placements.
Technologies: JavaScript, React, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Java

DevOps Engineer

2017 - 2020
15 Seconds of Fame
  • Maintained complex environments and infrastructure for development, staging, and production. Infrastructure span in-house datacenter servers, AWS, and Azure, with both Windows and Linux servers.
  • Developed processes to expand as well as maintain the environment.
  • Developed various Windows application services to monitor the health of Windows servers, and built a notification service to warn relevant team members when errors occur.
  • Constructed the build process of all the product applications. Set up the repo to the automated build system which then gets forwarded to go through automatic integration tests.
  • Set up a complex Azure infrastructure to be used for production applications such as scale sets, service fabric, web services, storage blobs, and more.
  • Updated, maintained, and set up backups for the WordPress of the main website.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Octopus Deploy, Jira, Git, Windows, Azure, Windows PowerShell, Python, C#

Software Engineer

2013 - 2018
RackWare, Inc.
  • Developed and enhanced features for the RMM suite that provides migration, disaster recovery, monitoring, and auto-scaling functionalities in C++.
  • Built and supported a REST API for the product in Python using the Django REST framework.
  • Contributed to customer-facing projects to help architect and implement solutions that optimize the utilization of hybrid cloud models.
  • Designed disaster recovery solutions to help back up and protect enterprise data while emphasizing on simplification and cost savings in the process.
  • Developed the framework for plugins in the core product to help the ease of introducing new asynchronous features as plugins.
  • Developed a new live synchronization tool consisting of a driver to detect all changes to a file system and record it, and a copy tool to read files and transfer the changes efficiently to the destination image (a sophisticated wrapper around dd).
Technologies: C++, Python

Assistant Programmer

2011 - 2013
UC Davis
  • Supported many data centers and servers for the entire College of Engineering at UC Davis.
  • Created an automation framework that is used to help maintain and manage all the servers in the data center.
  • Managed the network and firewalls for the many application servers used by the staff and study groups of the university.
  • Built features for the back end of the web portal. For example, developed an algorithm that helps resolve conflicts in student schedules.
Technologies: Bash, Python

REST API

Developed a REST API interface for the RMM suite (RackWare Management Module). Written in Python using Django rest framework.

Numerous Migration Projects

Moved many client servers cross data centers and clouds and supported these servers through application testing.

Numerous Disaster Recovery Projects

Designed and implemented disaster recovery solutions utilizing the cloud as an HA backup.

Auto-provisioning Framework

Designed and implemented the auto-provisioning framework for the cloud migration product. Auto-provisioning makes use of the specs and OS of the source server, and automatically provisions a target server to be as close as possible in the target environment. This framework utilizes APIs to provision servers. It's written in Python leveraging the request lib as well as GraphQL to interface with various clouds' API.

Cost Estimation Analysis

I wrote the cost estimation framework for the Hybrid Cloud Management Platform. This feature analyzes the usage data of servers to come up with suggested provisioning models for target servers. These provisioning models were created by the frameworks efficient use of API calls to the selected target environment. The target environment's capabilities as well as cost data were pulled and reorganized into a readable table for the user. This feature had to return very quickly for it should refresh every time the user makes a different selection. The framework was written Python utilizing different libraries to query APIs and make the appropriate calculations.

Other

IBM SoftLayer, Octopus Deploy, DNS, VMware ESXi, LDAP, Windows Clustering

Languages

Python, Java, C++, Bash, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Snowflake

Frameworks

Windows PowerShell, Express.js, Django, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Jest

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, Requests, React

Tools

VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer, Cluster, Git, Jira, Citrix XenApp, BigQuery

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Linux, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Windows, MacOS, CentOS, Citrix

Storage

MySQL Clustering, MongoDB, Azure Active Directory, Oracle 12c, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL

2009 - 2013

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science and Economics

University of California, Davis - California

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