Senior Backend & Distributed Systems Engineer
7+ years designing and operating large-scale, high-throughput systems in production. Building reliable, scalable services with end-to-end ownership from architecture to operations.
Latest Writing
Thoughts on systems design, architecture decisions, and engineering culture
About
Senior Backend & Distributed Systems Engineer with 7+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale, high-throughput systems in production.
I focus on building reliable, scalable services under real-world constraints, with end-to-end ownership from architecture design and system trade-offs, to production operations. My work emphasizes system correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability in distributed environments.
I work across product, frontend, AI, and infrastructure teams to drive ambiguous problems into well-defined systems, making pragmatic trade-offs between speed, scalability, and reliability.
My direction is building higher-scale distributed systems. Experience at Axon, TEKO Vietnam, and VNG has built a strong foundation for this path.
Core Strengths
Distributed Systems Design
Decomposing services along the right domain boundaries, not just convenient ones. Designing new services to fit cleanly into existing complex systems without introducing new failure modes. Building for data consistency and fault tolerance before they become incidents.
High-Throughput Systems
Event-driven architectures and data pipelines that hold up under real load. Performance work that starts from understanding the bottleneck, not guessing at it.
Production Excellence
Obsessive about observability because systems fail in ways you don't predict. Operational maturity built from being on-call, not just building the thing.
Areas of Focus
Particularly interested in these domains for deep expertise:
Database Performance
Optimization, scaling, and design patterns for high-throughput data systems.
Async Pipelines
Building reliable, scalable asynchronous processing systems and workflows.
Event-Driven Systems
Event sourcing, CQRS, and event-driven architectures at scale.
Core Skills & Technologies
Impact & Outcomes
Systems I've designed and led that moved the business forward
Cutting Weeks of Coordination Down to Days
Led extraction of a core domain from a monolith into a dedicated microservice. Established single ownership of the data model, eliminating cross-team coordination and cutting operational work from weeks to days. Delivered a clean, authoritative API that both frontend and downstream services can reliably build on.
Evolving an AI Pipeline Under Real Constraints
Led design and implementation of new AI capabilities, including face re-identification in long-form video, adapted into an existing production pipeline. The core challenge was navigating complexity vs. latency trade-offs within a system that was already live, while aligning with product timelines to deliver without compromise.
Keeping a Money Service Honest at Scale
Maintained and extended a high-consistency backend service handling real financial transactions. Tackled performance bottlenecks on large tables by diagnosing slow queries and shipping fixes that kept the system reliable as data volume grew.
Let's Connect
Currently exploring Senior Software Engineer roles in Ho Chi Minh City. If you're working on similar challenges like large-scale systems, distributed architecture, event-driven design, I'd be happy to connect.