# Will Luo > Software Engineering / Problem-Solving Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/willluo ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Applied Invention Jan 2021 – Present | Burbank, California, United States ### Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Datastore Infrastructure Team @ Udemy Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Continued to scale our datastore infrastructure as our user base and traffic grew substantially in 2020; focused more effort to improve security of our data and support our nascent services platform: - Implemented oss Redis clusters for new services in all environments - Implemented Hashicorp Vault clusters in all environments - Revamped MySQL slow query guardrail - Comprehensive site traffic replay/load-testing (and contributed to goreplay project to speed up its traffic replay function) - Reviewed new technology PoCs and architecture proposals as member of Technology Council - Improved MySQL CIS compliance ### Senior Staff Engineer, Infrastructure Systems Team @ Udemy Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Manage and expand our datastore infrastructure; work closely with our SRE team to improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of our site. - Managed production MySQL clusters and an enterprise Redis clusters in three data centers, using terraform, ansible, and custom automation in bash and python - Implemented and deployed ProxySQL clusters to scale and protect our production MySQL clusters - Redesigned a workflow/process used by our Data team to remove dangerous load on our production clusters and improve data aggregation workflow - Reviewed MySQL schema alter and related Django/Python pull requests - Created an annual road map for our team - Created and reviewed new technology proposals - Created automation scripts and runbooks to failover our production data stores to the disaster recovery data center - Optimized MySQL configurations and ran game days and load tests on a number of production clusters - Improved the reliability of our development database refresh process - On-call rotation and incident reviews - Onboarded and mentored junior engineers Technologies used: ansible, terraform, python, mysql, proxysql, haproxy, twemproxy/nutcracker, rabbitmq, celery, memcached, redis enterprise cluster, docker ### Sr. Platform Engineer, Systems Team @ Udemy Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area I ended up working more on production site-related projects, mainly centered around Udemy's databases and message queues. - Provisioned and configured production MySQL instances - Automated MySQL replication repair - "Ansibilized" a number of production clusters, including rabbitmq, backup, log aggregator, kafka/zookeeper - Tuned and tested production MySQL cluster configuration - Wrote tests for many ansible roles ### Senior Server Engineer @ Stitch Labs, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area - Implemented public API endpoints to allow 3PL partners to query customer orders and automated the fulfillment process - Implemented features in batch workers that synchronize and process customer data from a number of partners: Shopify, eBay, Amazon, Squareup, etc. - Updated legacy codebase to migration our system to a new sharded database (Vitess): swapped legacy mysql driver; reimplemented low-level database methods; updated queries that could not pass the new database guardrails - Collaborated with our Ops team: updated all MySQL nodes to use faster disks in order to add replication to our database cluster; provisioned many classes of servers (GCE) and updated our Ansible scripts when necessary; added monitoring to many services using in-house grafana system as well as New Relic; maintained our deployment and continuous-integration service and added feature to block deployment of untested branches - PHP; Python; MySQL; Vitess; Laravel; Ansible; Django; API ### Senior Software Engineer @ Gigaom Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 * Updated our analysts booking/subscription system to minimize manual steps from our sales team * Implemented an indexed taxonomy/facet search using Sphinx to reduce load from MySQL * Maintained and implemented 3rd-party integrations with Gigaom: Recurly, MailChimp, Marketo, etc. * Open-source contributions (in Github) include: GigaOM/go-sphinx; GigaOM-go-syncuser; GigaOM-go-mailchimp; GigaOM/go-marketo * PHP; WordPress; MySQL ### Principal Server Lead @ Invitor Jan 2012 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco * Designed and built the server infrastructure and API endpoints for an Android app (Phonegap/Cordova) * This was an on-going side-project with another collaborator who worked on the Android client * Python; Pyramid; Alchemy (ORM); MySQL ### Senior Software Engineer @ TuneUp Media Jan 2008 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco * Lead development of Windows and cross-platform code base for the flagship desktop app that scanned and corrected customers’ music collection metadata * Implemented usage tracking and analytics in our server application layer * Maintained the e-commerce integration (PayPal and Vindicia) * Managed source repository and application update pipeline, and coordinated commits from off-site contractors * C++/C; PHP; Jenkins; Capistrano ### Technical Lead/Consultant @ 24 Hr Diner, Inc. Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | Berkeley, CA * This was a very small collaboration to prototype and build a recommendation engine for web sites based purely on past visits by anonymous users. I was the sole developer initially and built the first prototype. * Python; Recommendation Engine; HMM ### Lead Software Engineer @ Metaweb Technologies, Inc. Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 | San Francisco, CA * Metaweb spun off from the work we did for Applied Minds, to productize the idea of a community-supported, heterogeneous data store and taxonomy that can be easily shared and are machine-readable * Implemented first version of a search engine and a clustered large file/object server * Maintained and optimized our data pipeline to import Wikipedia articles into our graph database * Python; Java; C++/C ### Senior Software Engineer @ Applied Minds, Inc. Jan 2001 – Jan 2005 | San Francisco, CA * As one of the founding developers in the SF group, prototyped many early stage ideas, from social network for government analysts to a driver for hardware 3D map display * Java; Python; C++/C ### Software Engineer @ Jumbodyne Corporation Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 | San Francisco, CA * This was a small start-up with the previous CTO of DoughNET. We were a very small team and worked on a project to record and playback browser requests in order to test and reproduce bugs in web applications. * Implemented an apache plugin to record HTTP requests and their metadata * C; Java; Apache ### Senior Java Developer @ DoughNET, Inc. Jan 1998 – Jan 2000 | San Francisco, CA * Designed and implemented two critical components of the site: an URL-rewriting proxy server and an event-driven email engine * Java; HTTP ### Member of Technical Staff @ Sun Microsystems, Inc. Jan 1996 – Jan 1997 | Mountain View, CA * Maintained the Motif library for Solaris’ Common Desktop Environment (CDE) * Maintained multi-thread X Windows and Motif tests submitted by the X-Consortium * As a consultant, verified customers’ bug submissions, sometimes onsite to be able to debug against customers’ proprietary libraries linked with libmotif. * C++/C; SunOS; Solaris; Unix ### Member Of Technical Staff @ Intel Corporation Jan 1996 – Jan 1996 | Hillsboro, Oregon I was a member of technical staff at the Intel Architecture Lab and worked on few projects related to managing Windows machines remotely. ## Education ### M.S. in Computer Science Georgia Institute of Technology ### B.S. in Mathematics-Physics Brown University ### Stuyvesant High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/willluo - GitHub: https://github.com/wluo/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/willluo JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/willluo/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10