Senior Software Engineer Full-Stack Technical Leader

Kevin Liu

San Ramon, CA• ***.*******@*****.*** • 857-***-****

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-l-8847b079/

CAREER SUMMARY

Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience in full-stack development, technical leadership, and team mentoring. A collaborative leader with strong communication skills, skilled at defining solutions, troubleshooting complex systems, and coaching team members. Expert in Java, SQL, XML, and web service development with a proven track record of guiding platform migrations and delivering scalable applications. Combines deep technical knowledge with a focus on code quality, stakeholder collaboration, and mentoring to drive successful project outcomes. TECHINICAL SKILLS

Programming Languages: Java, C++, SQL, XML, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, HTML5, CSS3

Frameworks & Libraries: Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Data JPA, Hibernate, Angular, RxJS, NgRx, Angular Material

Data & Messaging: PostgreSQL, pgvector, MySQL, Redis, Apache Kafka, SQL Server

Cloud & DevOps: AWS (ECS, EKS, Lambda, RDS, CloudWatch), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Jenkins

Architecture & Tools: REST API Design, Microservices, SOA, OpenAPI/Swagger, Prometheus, Grafana, Agile/Scrum

Development Practices: Code Review, Debugging, Troubleshooting, Mentoring, Coaching, CI/CD, Unit & Integration Testing, Security (OAuth 2.0, RBAC)

WORK EXPERIENCE

YELP CA, USA

Senior Software Engineer 06/2019 - Present

• Architected Spring Boot 2.1 REST services and Angular 8 merchant dashboards for business-profile and review workflows, decomposing legacy monolith endpoints into versioned APIs consumed by lazy-loaded Ivy SPAs.

• Streamlined the services-marketplace merchant onboarding pipeline in Java, identity verification integrations

(Persona, Stripe Identity), rules-based escalation, and SOC 2–aligned audit logging, cutting manual review queue volume by 40%.

• Developed Kafka-driven normalization jobs in Spring Boot 2.3 ingesting structured data from 15+ third-party local-business sources into Yelp’s canonical schema, reducing editorial data-correction tickets on new listings.

• Built consumer engagement backends for notification delivery (email/push), engagement scoring, and A/B experiment hooks integrated with Yelp’s internal experimentation framework.

• Contributed to Kubernetes adoption for merchant-platform service, Helm charts, HPA policies, liveness/readiness probes, and on-call incident response during migration off legacy EC2.

• Spearheaded refactor of the Request-a-Quote (RAQ) job-matching core from a synchronous monolith to async Spring Boot 2.5 workers with Kafka and PostgreSQL, lowering p99 latency from 2.4s to under 500ms at peak without changing downstream business rules.

• Led migration of business search relevance from sparse BM25 to dense semantic retrieval using PostgreSQL/pgvector and embedding pipelines; designed Kafka consumers so merchant vectors refresh within minutes of new review activity.

• Shipped an LLM inference routing gateway in Spring Boot 3.1 (Java 17) powering Yelp Assistant, abstracting OpenAI and Anthropic calls with routing by request type, cost envelope, and latency budget across service categories.

• Directed a 3-engineer effort moving services from hand-rolled EC2 to EKS workloads defined in Terraform and AWS CDK, with GitHub Actions canary deploys, deployment cycle from 4 hours to under 90 minutes with automated rollback on error-rate breach.

• Instrumented AI feature reliability in Prometheus and Grafana (latency, token usage, fallback rate, embedding drift), reducing mean time to detect model degradation from days to under 2 hours.

• Hardened platform security with OAuth 2.0/JWT, RBAC, encryption at rest for review and merchant data, and automated SAST/dependency scanning in CI pipelines.

• Mentored engineers on Java concurrency, Angular 15 standalone-component migration patterns, and Hibernate/Spring Boot upgrades during promotion and performance cycles. UC BERKELEY CA, USA

Software Engineer Co-op 05/2017 – 06/2019

• Constructed Spring Boot 1.5 and 2.0 MVC applications for departmental scheduling and room reservation, integrating CalNet SAML SSO as campus IdP standards matured in 2017–2018.

• Programmed Angular 6 operations dashboards for IT staff to monitor lab workstation availability across 20+ locations using RxJS 6 streams and Angular Material data tables.

• Migrated legacy Java EE modules to Spring Boot 2.0 with JPA/Hibernate 5.2 on SQL Server, increasing deployment frequency from quarterly to biweekly releases.

• Automated registrar bulk imports with Spring Batch 4.0 scheduled jobs. CSV validation, idempotent writes, and rollback on failure for semester rollover datasets.

• Resolved cross-browser accessibility defects in Angular 7 financial-aid review UIs, meeting WCAG 2.0 AA contrast and keyboard-navigation targets.

• Extended research tooling by pairing lightweight Spring Boot 2.1 APIs with Angular 8 charting for chemistry and CS instrument telemetry exposed from Python analysis pipelines.

• Documented REST contracts with Swagger 2.0 and trained student developers on Git workflow, pull requests, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk deployment slots before graduation handoff. EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, GPA:3.89 2016 – 2019

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