Kevin S Lin
Verified Expert in Engineering
Serverless Developer
Seattle, WA, United States
Toptal member since June 4, 2019
Kevin has nearly a decade of experience provisioning and scaling services in the cloud. He's spent more than five years working at AWS delivering critical features to native AWS services. In that time, Kevin has also worked directly with customers of all sizes—from startups to Netflix—and helped them build scalable cloud-native solutions.
Portfolio
Experience
- DevOps - 10 years
- AWS IAM - 6 years
- Amazon EC2 - 6 years
- Amazon S3 (AWS S3) - 6 years
- Pricing - 4 years
- AWS Lambda - 4 years
- Amazon Cognito - 4 years
- Serverless - 4 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Git, Vim Text Editor
The most amazing...
...thing I've implemented is the scaling system that underlied load balancers on AWS which resulted in a +500% speedup.
Work Experience
Consultant
Aptihealth
- Advised on the builds of HIPAA-compliant AWS architecture.
- Built out CI/CD pipeline on AWS.
- Established developer best practices on AWS.
- Advised on building the serverless back end.
- Consulted on security best practices and IAM policies.
- Gave advices on governance.
Fouder
Thence
- Drastically reduced AWS bills.
- Handled serverless deployments.
- Ensured HIPAA compliance on AWS.
- Implemented DevOps best practices.
- Scaled AWS workloads.
Consultant
Valimail
- Implemented SSO via Cognito and G Suite.
- Automated the scheduling of regular batch data transfer jobs.
- Create new development processes and tools to help developers work faster.
- Implement automation centered around gathering and reporting analytics.
- Setup and debugged various VPC and security group-related issues.
Senior Software Developer
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Designed and prototyped various end-to-end WebRTC-based multimedia experiences.
- Implemented global multitenant platform to manage Amazon's ideas portfolio.
- Built, ran, and evaluated Amazon's global ideas competition.
- Helped evaluate submissions to Amazon Catalyst, a program that provides mentorship, community, and up to $100,000 in funding for qualifying projects.
- Filed multiple patents on novel multimodal user-to-user interactions.
Senior Software Developer
Amazon
- Led a skunkworks Alexa project from idea to a successful prototype and demo to the senior leadership.
- Worked, patented, and pitched with a teammate an initial concept of what would become "Alexa Skill Blueprints" to the senior leadership.
- Designed and built out the initial back end of the new Alexa Developer Portal.
Senior Software Developer
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Developed the version 1 machine learning (ML) pipeline for Amazon Comprehend Medical.
- Built out end-to-end prototypes for various Flask-based web applications.
- Constructed end-to-end prototypes for various real-time mobile applications.
Software Engineer
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Scaled an ELB monitoring system which manages the health of millions of EC2 instances in real time.
- Implemented an ELB scaling agent which reduced scaling latency from the order of minutes to seconds.
- Designed and implemented ELB preemptive scaling which predicted future scaling based on past customer actions.
- Created and benchmarked LCU, a new system metric derived from a combination of different system resources that represented a load-balancer load (now a public metric in ALB).
- Designed and led teams to create and manage custom private ELB APIs for select partners.
Experience
Load Balancer Capacity Unit (LCU)
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/The LCU metric takes into account network, packets per seconds, active connections, and other factors to give a more accurate picture of how much work the load balancer is doing. It is now a public metric on AWS, and also the metric used when calculating the bill for load balancers on AWS.
Education
Bachelor of Science (BSc) Degree in Computer Science
Rice University - Houston, TX, USA
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, AWS Amplify, React, TensorFlow, WebRTC
Tools
Amazon Cognito, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS IAM, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS CodeBuild, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Vim Text Editor, Git, Amazon Athena, AWS Step Functions
Paradigms
DevOps, HIPAA Compliance, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration (CI), Agile
Platforms
AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Alexa
Storage
Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL, Elasticsearch, NoSQL
Languages
Python, JavaScript, Ruby, SQL, Java, Bash
Frameworks
Apache Spark, Flask, Django, Express.js, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Other
Elastic Load Balancers, Pricing, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Certificate Manager, Serverless, Autoscaling, API Gateways, Amazon Route 53, WebSockets
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