Staff Software Engineer with AI Platform Leadership

NORMAN LIU

Staff Software Engineer

+1-564-***-**** - ************@*******.*** - Austin, TX

WORK EXPERIENCE

Walmart

Staff Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Jan 2019 - Present

Led end-to-end development and launch of Wally AI, a high-impact platform for 100 million SKUs, delivering root-cause diagnosis, real-time insights, replenishment integration, and scalable systems that empowered merchants to resolve issues faster, optimize inventory, cut waste, boost sales, and generate over $55 million in cost savings and productivity gains.

● Implemented an advanced calculation engine powered by Java/Spring Boot, Spark, and Hadoop that instantly performs complex margin, risk, and forecast impact analyses, eliminating hours of manual spreadsheet work for hundreds of merchants daily.

● Developed a reasoning layer built with Python/FastAPI and LangGraph that delivers precise, context-aware insights on demand, promotions, and trends, helping merchants optimize assortments and boost category sales performance by up to 15%.

● Engineered seamless integration with Walmart’s real-time replenishment system through Kafka, Spring Boot, and REST APIs to provide merchants with live, actionable recommendations that improved in-stock rates and minimized stockouts at scale.

● Optimized data processing pipelines across Kafka, Flink, and Airflow to handle massive daily volumes, ensuring the AI delivers timely insights that protect revenue and improve product availability across 100 million SKUs.

● Established a scalable data lake architecture on Azure, GCP, PostgreSQL and Redis that supports both current needs and future growth, ensuring the platform remains fast and reliable as Walmart expands to serve millions more customers daily.

● Designed an intuitive chat-based interface with React/Next.js and TypeScript that allowed merchants to interact with AI using everyday language, dramatically increasing tool adoption by 75% and reducing time spent on complex data queries by over 70%.

● Created real-time dashboards using GraphQL, Kafka streams, and Elasticsearch that display live inventory and sales insights, enabling merchants to make faster decisions and improve product availability across stores by 18%.

● Built comprehensive testing environments with Docker, Kubernetes, Jest and Cypress that mirrored production, catching issues early and protecting business reliability.

● Streamlined efficient CI/CD pipelines across GitHub Actions and Jenkins that accelerated development cycles by 50%, allowing the team to deliver value to merchants more frequently and reliably.

● Deployed an automated monitoring and alerting system powered by ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana that detected issues early, minimizing downtime and protecting merchandising productivity.

● Collaborated with finance stakeholders to quantify Wally’s ROI, providing clear evidence of over $55 million in cost savings and productivity improvements for continued support.

● Mentored team members on Agile principles and code reviews that increased overall productivity and helped deliver more reliable AI features to merchants.

Flatiron Health

Senior Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA

May 2012 - Oct 2018

Drove full-stack and platform engineering delivery for OncoEMR in a fast-paced environment, building critical microservices and scalable infrastructure that improved clinician efficiency by 40%+, reduced medication ordering errors, supported 99.9% uptime, and accelerated delivery of real-world oncology data for cancer research.

● Led backend development of the Treatment Plan Service with Ruby and AWS Lambda, simplifying complex cancer treatment protocols and helping oncologists create personalized plans more efficiently.

● Implemented the Clinical Documentation Service backend through Ruby-based APIs on AWS EC2, transforming unstructured doctor notes into usable data that supported better clinical decisions.

● Architected the central API Gateway that orchestrated communication across all OncoEMR microservices with AWS API Gateway and ELB, improving system reliability and developer productivity.

● Built responsive patient chart interfaces in React and JavaScript, enabling clinicians to access complete oncology patient information in seconds, reducing time spent searching for records.

● Created a streamlined Order Management frontend with structured validation workflows that made chemotherapy and medication ordering safer, faster, and more accurate.

● Engineered scalable database infrastructure on AWS RDS and Snowflake that supported OncoEMR’s growth across dozens of cancer centers without performance degradation.

● Led development of end-to-end testing suites for critical oncology workflows with Jest and Playwright, ensuring patient safety and system stability across cancer care delivery.

● Designed CI/CD pipelines powered by Jenkins, Docker, and AWS ECS, reducing deployment time from days to hours, shortening time-to-value for new oncology features.

● Collaborated closely with product owners and clinicians to translate oncology needs into clear, actionable user stories.

● Worked in an Agile Scrum environment, contributing to sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives to improve team velocity and delivery speed.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

● Languages : Java, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, SQL, Bash

● Backend & APIs : Spring Boot, FastAPI, Node.js, Express.js, Ruby on Rails, REST APIs, GraphQL, gRPC, Microservices

● Frontend : React, Next.js, HTML5, CSS3, Tailwind CSS

● Data & Streaming : Kafka, Flink, Spark, Hadoop, Airflow, Snowflake

● Databases & Search : PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Redis, Elasticsearch

● Cloud & Infrastructure : Azure, GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform

● AI/ML Systems : GenAI Frameworks, LangGraph, RAG Pipelines, MLOps, LLM Applications, Real-Time AI Reasoning

● Testing : JUnit, RSpec, PyTest, Jest, Cypress, Playwright

● DevOps : GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CI/CD

● Observability : Splunk, ELK Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

● Practices : System Design, Agile Scrum, Code Reviews, Mentorship EDUCATION

The University of Texas at Dallas

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

2009 - 2012

Richardson, TX

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