# Jason Gao > Software Engineer at Retool, Inc. Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jasongao Hi, and nice to meet you! I'm a career-driven software engineer focused mostly on backend work. I started my career inheriting a large set of legacy scripts and learning the ins and outs of CI. In 2019, I switched gears within my organization to an infrastructure team, where I have had the pleasure of learning how to build at scale and how to make huge changes without downtime. I love to learn and work on new things, and when I see a challenge that I don't know how to solve, I enjoy figuring out the missing pieces. Welcome to my page! ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Retool Jan 2024 – Present | New York, New York, United States ### Software Engineer @ Retool Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco, California, United States Software Engineer with the Core Infrastructure team, maintaining and upgrading our cloud and on-premise infrastructure. Kubernetes, NodeJS, Postgres stack. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Okta Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States ### Senior Software Engineer @ Okta Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco, California, United States Worked on the core engineering team, maintaining and upgrading critical frameworks, infrastructure, and supporting services critical to Okta. • Reworked Okta’s email sending logic to account for a limitation with a third-party vendor which required updates in both the main Okta service and our mail relay system. • Built and maintained a tool to encrypt sensitive properties for use by production systems, with a focus on developer experience and ease of use. • Migrated an extensively used legacy microservice from ancient EC2 hardware to Dockerized infrastructure. Due to the reach and age of the service, this change involved several months of performance testing and creating new alerts and dashboards that outclassed existing monitoring tools for the service. • Led two projects to migrate infrastructure components into the AWS GovCloud boundary, including replacement of a third-party vendor in order to maintain FedRamp compliance. ### Software Engineer @ Okta Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, California, United States Worked on the release engineering team, helping to scale and build out tooling to support releases and deployments of our rapidly growing infrastructure. • Worked with a small team of three to manage deployments and handle hotfixes in a hectic on-call rotation, which fully rotated every 2-3 weeks • Maintained and made significant improvements to our release tooling and process, helping the team go from largely manual, complicated weekly releases to streamlined, one-button releases. • Owned and maintained build processes for all Okta code, including complex artifact versioning logic. • Led a major project to change the way Okta’s main artifact was published to conform with a monthly release cadence instead of a weekly cadence. This was a multi-month project that involved project managers and careful execution with a single cutoff date. • Proactively suggested and built a slackbot to automate answers to common questions for the oncall, such as whether or not a hotfix branch was correctly rebased and passing CI, significantly reducing the need for oncall availability off-hours. • Completely rewrote Okta’s artifact promotion module to be extensible and support configuration files. ### Release Engineering Intern @ Okta, Inc. Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco, CA Worked on several different projects for the release engineering team at Okta, including a Python library and command-line tool to interact with Artifactory and Docker using their REST API, a branch cleaner for our Github repositories, and a frontend component built on our CI system to automate hotfixes. ### Solution Consulting Intern @ Kaiser Permanente Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Pleasanton, CA Temporarily joined the Infrastructure Program-Disaster Recovery (DR) team, responsible for creating a stable backup system for company services in the event of major catastrophic data center failure. - Worked on data analysis projects for team productivity and work order management, often with a visual or graphical component. - Aided in departmental DR-related tasks related to such as DR DNS switching and DR server isolation, gaining experience in communicating across multiple teams and companies to produce one streamlined result. ### Teacher Assistant for 3D Game Design @ BiTSSmart Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Assisted instructor in teaching children 8-12 game design concepts upon Minecraft as a platform, utilizing in-game tools of redstone and command blocks to create functioning "adventure maps". ## Education ### Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science University of California, Berkeley ### High School diploma in General Studies Rancho Bernardo High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jason-gao-7806a788 - Website: https://github.com/jjlgao - Website: http://jjlgao.github.io --- Source: https://flows.cv/jasongao JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jasongao/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05