Philip Kim, Developer in Washington, DC, United States
Philip is available for hire
Hire Philip

Philip Kim

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Washington, DC, United States
Toptal Member Since
December 14, 2020

Phil is a full-stack web applications developer who has spent time on the Microsoft stack and in the Rails shop and is now working with a statically-typed language. He has worked in investment banking and federal contracting at business-to-business and consumer finance startups. Phil loves loosely-coupled, orthogonal software components written in concise, declarative code.

RDBMSJavaPostgreSQLMySQLHibernateC#.NETRuby on Rails (RoR)VuePythonRubyApache KafkaReact

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Vue, C#.NET, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Java

The most amazing...

...thing I've implemented is a distributed decision engine linking machine learning models and expert systems to produce the best available results in real-time.

Work Experience

Software Engineer

2019 - PRESENT
Fundrise, LLC
  • Served as a software engineer specialized in performance optimization for recurring back-end processes implemented in Java against a MySQL datastore. Reduced runtime and memory usage by 30 to 60%.
  • Designed and implemented a data model, processors, and back-end support for new features and products.
  • Collaborated with accounting and finance teams to design and implement systems and processes for end-of-quarter and end-of-year tax and regulatory compliance requirements.
Technologies: MySQL, Hibernate, Java

Senior Software Engineer

2017 - 2019
Optoro, Inc.
  • Reimplemented SmartDisposition, a decision engine that connected machine learning models, various data sources, and expert systems to produce the best available decisions in real-time, including a custom domain-specific language for configuration.
  • Built quantitative models for key business processes to leverage more data into better decision making.
  • Developed across the entire stack, from the Vue.js web UI to the Apache Kafka message bus to deliver scalable, performant, and maintainable software.
Technologies: Apache Kafka, Vue, PostgreSQL, Ruby

Senior Software Developer

2013 - 2016
Sanametrix, Inc.
  • Led a team that developed a case management system for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
  • Developed a survey collection web application for the United States Department of Education.
  • Saved a project that was poorly scoped and behind schedule and led an accelerated development effort to deliver it on time and under budget.
Technologies: Entity Framework, React, C#.NET

SmartDisposition for Optoro

This was an API service that drove critical, real-time business decisions. It comprised a directed dependency graph of machine-learning models, internal and external data sources, and expert systems. SmartDisposition executed as many concurrent paths through the graph as possible in order to deliver the best available results on a time-sensitive basis.

I reimplemented the entire application using the Ruby concurrency library and designed a custom domain-specific language for configuring the dependency graph that enabled loose coupling between the graph nodes.

Because the parts of the system all varied in their degree of CPU usage, I/O usage, and reliability, this enabled us to have a robust, performant system that maximized throughput, minimized latency, and could handle failures gracefully.

Languages

Java, C#.NET, JavaScript, Python, Ruby

Frameworks

Hibernate, Ruby on Rails (RoR)

Storage

RDBMS, PostgreSQL, MySQL

Libraries/APIs

Vue, React, Entity Framework

Platforms

Apache Kafka

2013 - 2015

Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science

University of Maryland - College Park, MD

1996 - 2001

Bachelor of Arts Degree in Anthropology

Yale University - New Haven, CT