Philip Kim, Developer in Washington, DC, United States
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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.

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