# Kevin Nguyen > Staff Software Engineer at Block Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kevinnguyen3 Staff Software Engineer with 11+ years of experience architecting high-scale distributed systems and robust software solutions. A UCLA Computer Science alumnus with a proven track record of resolving complex technical problems and mentoring cross-functional teams. I specialize in driving long-term technical strategy and infrastructure scalability. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Block Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area • De-fragmented the company’s eventing architecture by consolidating 3 legacy platforms into a single, high-throughput unified system on Kafka. Eliminated data sprawl and cross-team friction by pioneering a schema-first governance model, resulting in a 99.9% reduction in downstream data corruption and standardized event production across 50+ microservices ### Senior Software Engineer @ Block Jan 2019 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area • Architected a Data Privacy Engine that dynamically redacts PII across the eventing platform, mitigating compliance risks. Partnered with Security to implement a semantic data classification system, enabling 100% automated mapping of user-defined data types to global privacy policies for 20+ downstream consumers • Steered the Infrastructure squad as Tech Lead, orchestrating a multi-quarter roadmap and partnering with Product to define technical boundaries leveraging deep domain expertise to advocate for the customer perspective ### Software Engineer @ Block Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area • Pioneered Block’s Customer Data Platform (CDP), architecting Ingestion and Router services to process 1B+ daily messages. Engineered a distributed Pub/Sub architecture for real-time synchronization across Amplitude, Iterable, and 5+ internal sinks, maintaining sub-second latency and high fault tolerance at scale • Architected a high-throughput data pipeline to sync 3TB of daily CDP messages to Snowflake. Optimized infrastructure spend by implementing an hourly aggregation and automated ingestion strategy, ensuring high data availability for mission-critical business reporting and enterprise ETL workflows ### Software Engineer III @ Ericsson Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Santa Clara, California Analytics Platform team at Ericsson MediaFirst Deployment • Used SaltStack to automate deployment and configuration of analytics infrastructure including: Kafka, Zookeeper, Mesosphere, Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Zabbix • Over 20 trial/production environments were deployed without manual steps in Azure cloud and Openstack Realtime Streaming Data Pipeline • Built platform instrumentation library in C# used by every service for aggregating performance counters and flushing logs/counters to multiple sinks including Kafka and a rotating local file • Integrated Logstash to forward logs from Kafka to Elasticsearch/Kibana for visualization C# Services and Workers • Delivered Analytics Collection Service to serve as public endpoint for external clients to send their logs into the data pipeline. This service writes logs to Kafka and large datasets to blob storage • Built Analytics Collection Worker to validate different types of logs in Kafka against its respective schema to prevent forwarding conflicting field mappings to backend data stores. Validation happens offline instead of at the collection service to reduce client latency awaiting acknowledgment from collection service • Implemented Monitoring worker to do discovery on expected service instances and check for matching service heartbeats. Service center relies on alerts from this worker to detect stopped services • Wrote customer-facing controllers in OSS Proxy (Operations Support System) to manage data retrieval from Analytics data stores. ### Software Engineer II @ Ericsson Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | Santa Clara ### Software Engineering Intern @ Ericsson Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Mountain View • Implemented a high-concurrency data pipeline to stream logs from Azure Blob Storage to MySQL, transforming cold telemetry into actionable insights. Dramatically improved developer productivity by providing a searchable interface for service logs, reducing the average time to diagnose production issues ### Software Engineering Intern @ Verimatrix Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Greater San Diego Area • Developed a library for RedHat JBOSS Data Grid and implemented it as a distributed caching tier in front of MySQL. Reduced decryption key retrieval latency by 90%, significantly accelerating the video content encryption pipeline and improving overall stream initialization times ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science UCLA ### Scripps Ranch High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kevin-nguyen-26409465 --- Source: https://flows.cv/kevinnguyen3 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kevinnguyen3/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12