David Liao, Developer in San Francisco, CA, United States
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David Liao

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

San Francisco, CA, United States

Toptal member since February 26, 2019

Bio

David is a leading engineer with years of experience working at multiple hyper-growth startups. He has led and contributed to engineering teams for both infrastructure and software. Over the years, David has developed software, managed cloud infrastructure, and automating deployments. He also has expertise in AWS/GCP, Terraform, Ansible, and Docker.

Portfolio

Apollo.io
DigitalOcean, Digital, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Redis, MongoDB, CircleCI...
Datanyze
Node.js, PHP, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Memcached, Amazon Aurora...
RealNetworks
Git, Jenkins, FFmpeg, PHP, MongoDB, Node.js

Experience

  • JavaScript - 4 years
  • MongoDB - 4 years
  • Linux - 4 years
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 4 years
  • Ansible - 3 years
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - 3 years
  • Docker - 2 years
  • Terraform - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Cloud, Git

The most amazing...

...software I've built is a CRM enrichment product that was also integrated with multiple CRMs and all of the company's data points.

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer

2018 - PRESENT
Apollo.io
  • Migrated all of the resources from Azure Cloud to Google Cloud Platform.
  • Managed and led all of the infrastructure initiatives and personnel.
  • Built out a CI pipeline for continuous testing and deployments.
  • Defined all of the infrastructure as code with Terraform and Ansible.
  • Migrated and manage multi-terabyte MongoDB and Elasticsearch databases.
  • Developed a number of features in the main web app.
Technologies: DigitalOcean, Digital, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Redis, MongoDB, CircleCI, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform

Director of Engineering

2015 - 2018
Datanyze
  • Managed and led the engineering teams locally and all remote offices.
  • Rewrote and reengineered web crawlers' code and architecture to support crawling millions of website daily.
  • Solved key scalability and reliability issues.
  • Created multiple microservices to support our APIs.
  • Created a CRM enrichment product that was updating millions of records a day.
Technologies: Node.js, PHP, DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Memcached, Amazon Aurora, MySQL, MongoDB, Ansible

Software Development Engineer

2015 - 2015
RealNetworks
  • Expanded the media player support to other websites.
  • Built an internal content repository to support the QA team for finding test content.
  • Worked on generating new metrics to feed into dashboards.
Technologies: Git, Jenkins, FFmpeg, PHP, MongoDB, Node.js

Apollo Azure to GCP Migration

I independently migrated all services and resources from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud Platform. This involved multi-terabyte databases and web applications; in addition, it was completed in two weeks with less than ten minutes of downtime.

Web Crawlers

I rewrote the code to reduce complexity as well as increase efficiency. Next, I rearchitected the deployment to further increase throughput. At the end of the day, the crawlers were crawling over 20 million websites a day on a very low budget for servers.

CRM Enrichment

I created a CRM enrichment product that pushes the company's data that was collected from my web crawlers and other sources to various CRMs. I initially integrated with Salesforce and redesigned the code to quickly expanded to HubSpot and Marketo.

Libraries/APIs

React, Salesforce API, Node.js, FFmpeg, Facebook API, Google API

Tools

Terraform, Ansible, Google Stackdriver, CircleCI, Jenkins, Git

Languages

JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Bash, Python

Platforms

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), DigitalOcean, Linux, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Heroku, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)

Storage

MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, Memcached

Frameworks

Ruby on Rails (RoR), Express.js

Paradigms

Agile Software Development

Other

Sprint Planning, Cloud, Digital

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