# Douglas Soo > Software Engineering Leader Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/douglassoo A veteran of multiple small startups as a single-digit employee, I have worked on everything from 3D rendering engines to large distributed systems, in roles ranging from dedicated low-level coder to project manager and engineering director. I am extremely passionate about the work that I do, and love working for startups that have missions that I can really believe in, with interesting and hard technical problems to solve. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Honeycomb.io Jan 2019 – Present | San Francisco, CA, United States ### Software Engineer at Large @ Scalable Interfaces, LLC Jan 2018 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Taking time to investigate potential ideas for new companies, and refreshing technical skills. Also performing part-time software engineering and leadership consulting work. Also, full-time kitten parent! ### Director of Engineering - Availability @ Twitch Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 Engineering leader focused on improving the overall availability of Twitch's website and services, primarily by providing best practices and tools that all of Twitch engineering can use to monitor, alert, and debug their systems in production. * Founded a team to build tools to improve operational observability of production systems at Twitch. * Designed and helped implement an engineering-wide service catalog. * Worked with team to come up with and implement strategies for scaling Twitch's engineering metrics platforms to handle growth to millions of data points a second. ### Roving Engineering Leader @ Twitch Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Focused on improving Twitch's engineering in a non-management leadership role. In particular, focused on scalability, stability, and security. * Did capacity planning for key Twitch systems, allowing us to scale well past 1 million concurrent users in large scale events. * Hands-on design and implementation to improve scalability and stability of key Twitch systems. * Designed and assisted in implementing key authentication and authorization systems to improve the security, robustness and performance of Twitch APIs. * Key participant in Twitch's engineering hiring, responsible for interviewing multiple candidates a week. ### Director of Frontend Engineering @ Twitch Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 Managed a 20+ person engineering team focused on Twitch's frontend (i.e. non-video) customer experience, including client applications (iOS, Android, XBox), web front-end, and web backend (Rails). * Introduced processes to improve developer efficiency, including agile project management. * Applied technical expertise to help drive overall technical direction for the team. * Managed our nascent QA organization. * Worked with engineering leadership to create more consistent employee leveling for all of engineering. * Highly involved in the hiring process for the whole engineering organization. ### Software Engineer @ Twitch Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco, California Engineer working on Twitch's back end video distribution system. Also transitioned to managing a new release engineering tooling team. ### Founder @ Scalable Interfaces, LLC Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 While not rock climbing, baking, sailing, and generally relaxing, I am taking time to investigate the current state of the art in mobile app development and high performance distributed systems. On hiatus due to being employed full-time at twitch.tv ### Engineer at Large @ Massive Health Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 First employee and engineer at Massive Health. Full stack development, from HTML, JavaScript and Objective-C on iOS to Ruby on Rails on the server. Shipped The Eatery, an iPhone app and service that uses crowdsourced health ratings to help improve people's health. ### Chief Architect, Core Platform @ Linden Lab Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 Chief Architect for the Core Platform team, which was responsible for most of the server software that ran Second Life. Focused primarily on software development process improvements, core server architecture improvements, and working closely with the product development team on short-term and long-term product roadmaps. ### Engineering Director, Core Platform @ Linden Lab Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 One of 3 engineering directors responsible for the overall coordination of engineering and development at Linden Lab. Responsibilities included creating development roadmaps and processes, personnel management, and hands-on development. The Core Platform team focused on the development and maintenance of server side technologies, including scripting, physics, simulation, digital asset management, and billing. ### Studio Director @ Linden Lab Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 Coordinated the development of multiple projects, primarily focusing on simulation and user scripting. Coordinated with other Studio Directors to help with overall development planning and prioritization, as well as continued hands-on software development. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Linden Lab Jan 2001 – Jan 2006 Sixth employee at Linden Lab. Software developer, responsible for development of rendering technologies using OpenGL, network protocols for prioritized transmission of textures and objects, as well as performance optimization of both rendering engine and server side codebases. Also managed the releases of multiple client and server versions. Development in various combinations of C++, Python, and various other scripting languages. ### Software Engineer @ MyAble, Inc. Jan 1999 – Jan 2001 Software developer, working mostly in C++. Worked on core implementation of an outsourced personalized portal system. Also did development in PHP of an administrative interface after company was bought by Phone.com (Openwave) ### Software Engineer @ ThinkFish Jan 1997 – Jan 1999 Computer graphics development in C++, primarily focused on a real-time non-photorealistic 3D rendering engine, used by various plug-in renderers, and the clip art program LiveArt 98. After purchase by Computer Associates, worked on design and implementation of a prototype 2D network diagramming and layout system. ## Education ### M. Eng in SB, Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/douglas-soo --- Source: https://flows.cv/douglassoo JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/douglassoo/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12