# Kwan-I Lee > Staff Software Engineer Location: Milpitas, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kwani Highly accomplished Software Engineering leader with 13+ years of experience spanning both IC and management roles. Deep expertise in building and scaling critical distributed systems, authentication/identity platforms, and search infrastructure. Key strengths include technical leadership, architecting fault-tolerant services, and cost optimization. Proficient in infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD, and core languages (C++, Java, TypeScript). ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Descript Jan 2023 – Present ### Engineering Manager @ Robinhood Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 Authentication Platform team, Security • Established the Authentication Platform team from 1 to ~7 engineers with focus on maintaining, improving, and revamping Robinhood’s authentication framework and infrastructure. • Led the team to ship WebAuthn (Passkeys) for Robinhood, which provided customers safe and fast access to their accounts with a delightful experience. This also made Robinhood the first Fintech company which adopts this security feature. • Led the team to reduce ~50% of AWS cost (millions) for running the authentication services. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Robinhood Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 Trust and Safety team, Security • Migrated the authentication service (high throughput, millions QPS at peak) from EC2 to kubernetes without causing downtime. • Designed the entire backend architecture and APIs for Robinhood’s Device Approvals. ### Software Engineer (Tech Lead) @ Airbnb Jan 2016 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Auth Infra team (former Services Infrastructure team), Trust Membership • Tech-leading Airbnb’s authentication infrastructure team, rebuilt the architecture from scratch, which included designing, implementing, maintaining, and improving the user authentication backend, signup/login backend, OAuth platform, and GDPR workflow. • Providing mentorship on all other authentication related components, which include session management/tracking, OAuth presentation service, and cache invalidation pipeline. • Designed, implemented, and rolled out a JWT-like but strongly typed internal authentication token which is cryptographically-protected and used to deprecate the plain text user id from authentication path. • Secured Airbnb's APIs by defaulting all APIs to use a require_log_in filter, this also contributed to the company's anti-scraping initiative. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Walmart eCommerce Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Sunnyvale Search System Team • Build the search engine for http://www.walmart.com/, using Solr as backbone and add some business logic on top of it. Modify Solr core when needed. Strive for making the search system fast, robust, and scalable. • Involved in various distributed system related projects, including Liveupdate (internal configuration management mechanism), Nead Real-time Indexing, distributed rate limiting, etc. • Work on Solr(an open source search engine) and Couchbase(an open source NoSQL database) plugin, which makes Solr to be able to implicitly index any document updates or changes that happen on Couchbase side, achieving real-time/near real-time search engine indexing. This project is also contributed to open source: https://github.com/LucidWorks/solr-couchbase-plugin/ ### Software Engineer @ Oracle Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Redwood Shore • Key Developer for Oracle Privilege Account Manager (OPAM), the product helping customers to better manage their accounts and passwords over different types of system such as ldap, database, unix etc. • Work on the integration over RESTful API and Linux command line tool, solid understanding in RESTful web services, XML, XSD, SQL, JSON, Linux shell script, and Java EE framework. • Implement plug-in framework, which allows users to embed user-defined programs into OPAM, dynamically loading and executing the programs. • Experience with modifying Java ClassLoader, multi-threading infrastructure, and system load balancing. ### COMS W6111 Advanced Database System Teaching Assistant @ Columbia University Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ### COMS W4701 Artificial Intelligence Teaching Assistant @ Columbia University Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ### Workstation Lab Teaching Assistant @ National Taiwan University Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 • Managed unix-like machines (FreeBSD and Linux system) in the internet data center of Computer Science and Information Engineering Department, NTU. • Maintained 30 servers, including mail server, NFS server, web server and backup server. • Over 1500 people using this IDC, including undergraduates, postgraduates, professors, and alumni. ### Object-Oriented Software Design Teaching Assistant @ National Taiwan University Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 ### Introduction of Computer Science Teaching Assitant @ National Taiwan University Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Taiwan ## Education ### Master of Science in Computer Science, Computer Science Columbia Engineering ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Bachelor of Science, Computer Science and Information Engineering National Taiwan University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kwan-i-lee-91212248 --- Source: https://flows.cv/kwani JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kwani/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05