# Derek Tanaka

> Lead Software Engineer at Capital One

Location: New York, New York, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/derektanaka

I am a senior backend software engineer with over seven years of experience designing and operating large scale distributed systems. I specialize in building reliable backend services and APIs that handle real world constraints such as scale, failure modes, and safety requirements.

I have led complex technical efforts end to end, from system design through production rollout and iteration, and I consistently improve system quality through production driven learnings, thoughtful testing, and strong ownership. I am most effective in hands on roles focused on backend or platform systems where reliability, scalability, and long term system health matter.

## Work Experience
### Lead Software Engineer @ Capital One
Jan 2025 – Present | New York, New York, United States
* Designed and implemented a cross-system customer identity solution integrating vendor and in-house platforms, establishing a consistent unique identifier across claims, notifications, and external APIs
* Defined integration strategies between vendor systems, tokenization services, and in-house platforms to enable compliant access to PII data
* Independently ramped on and shipped production code to a service owned by another team within one month

### Senior Software Engineer (Interim Manager) @ Capital One
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | New York, New York, United States
* Delivered a real-time content management system reducing content update time-to-market by ~25×, including ADA-compliant voice guidance workflows
* Designed and built a backend orchestration API integrating three independent datastores to serve ~1,350 distributed ATMs polling twice every five minutes
* Engineered resilience against thundering herd scenarios caused by synchronized ATM cold starts through caching, exponential backoff, and request shaping
* Introduced production-driven reliability improvements, including exponential backoff and dynamic payload partitioning after discovering datastore limits in production
* Designed APIs to fail closed under partial datastore outages, prioritizing recoverability, compliance, and brand safety over serving stale data

### Senior Software Engineer @ Capital One
Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | New York, New York, United States
* Rebuilt ATM UI in React with an incremental rollout strategy and CI/CD focus to minimize release risk
* Designed and built a WebSocket server orchestrating events between ATM hardware, UI, and cloud services
* Designed and implemented an in-house feature flagging system to decouple deployments from releases and increase backend deployment velocity
* Developed an end-to-end testing framework supporting seamless switching between vendor and in-house solutions

### Software Engineer @ Capital One
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | New York, New York, United States
* Led 3 devs to revamp UI using React Hooks, reducing state management brittleness
* Pioneered a Jenkins + Docker CI/CD pipeline supporting automated unit and E2E testing, streamlined releases.

### Associate Software Engineer @ Capital One
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | New York, New York, United States
* Integrated React UI with vendor systems using React Redux and Jest for test coverage and state reliability.

### Software Engineer Internship @ Capital One
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Richmond, Virginia Area
Created two Elasticsearch cluster dashboards (1 detailed view, 1 summarized view) for monitoring relevant metrics relating to cluster health
Produced a pipeline to automatically pull, filter, manipulate, and push data to and from different DBs for a given frequency
Used an Amazon EC2 instance to host code written using Ruby, Python, Shell scripts and Logstash configs

### Teaching Assistant (Data Structures and Algorithms) @ Washington University in St. Louis
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | St. Louis, MO
Data Structures and Algorithms

- Review course material for relevancy to interview questions
- Hold office hours twice a week & answer Piazza questions
- Instruct and guide students during Lab sessions
- Proctor/grade exams
- Grade Homework and Labs

### Software Engineer @ Bitwage
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016
Full-stack web development in Python and JavaScript on Google App Engine. Led integration with Bitso, developing new customer-facing feature enabling international payroll and through Mexican Pesos via Bitcoin exchange.  Incorporated instant customer deposits with Mexican banks during standard Mexican Banking hours.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Economics
Washington University in St. Louis

### Saratoga High School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tanakaderek

---
Source: https://flows.cv/derektanaka
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/derektanaka/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-30