Staff Full-Stack Engineer → ML Inference
Tony Lee
Professional Summary
Staff-level full-stack software engineer with 10+ years shipping production frontend, backend, and APIs and leading architecture across cross-regional teams — Angular-to-React modernization, CI/CD and test automation, and measurable performance work. Now transitioning into ML inference engineering through self-directed, reproducible labs: vLLM GPU serving on AWS/EKS, autoscaling and admission control, KV-cache and quantization tradeoffs, and CUDA/Triton kernel benchmarking — measured honestly, negative results included.
Work Experience
Staff Software Engineer
Sep 2024 - Present
DTEX Systems
- Designed distributed platform services across UI, API, data, and infrastructure boundaries, with emphasis on reliability, deployment safety, and cross-service coordination.
- Improved release stability by containerizing UI services, decoupling shared dependencies, and isolating high-risk deployment surfaces.
- Led a launch-critical OpenSearch Dashboards migration, resolving deployment and environment issues with AWS/OpenSearch engineers.
- Built local development and validation automation that cut dev/test iteration latency by 20% and improved onboarding.
Senior Technical Lead
Aug 2019 - Apr 2024
Cisco Systems, Inc.
- Led architecture for the Onboarding Experience platform, helping enterprise customers complete onboarding in under 30 minutes.
- Drove system design across frontend, backend, APIs, and integrations, resolving tradeoffs across US, Europe, and India engineering groups.
- Led AngularJS-to-React modernization to remove security risk and improve maintainability; introduced Cypress end-to-end testing that cut test creation time by 50%.
- Built CI/CD and test automation improvements that reduced regression risk in high-visibility customer onboarding flows.
Senior Software Engineer
Jan 2019 - Aug 2019
Tico Co., Ltd.
- Improved message loading performance by 60% through frontend and API optimization and reduced codebase size by 30% through modular refactoring.
Co-founder / CTO
Apr 2016 - Oct 2018
Popup Technology Co., Ltd.
- Built the core platform from scratch, led a 5-person engineering team, and shipped features that doubled revenue within 12 months.
ML Inference — Self-Directed (2025–Present)
Self-funded, reproducible labs built to learn ML inference in the open — GPU serving and kernel work documented with methodology and negative results, not just wins.
GPU Inference Decision Lab
AWS EKS + Karpenter + vLLM- Provisioned a GPU serving stack on AWS EKS with Terraform and Karpenter, running vLLM behind an OpenAI-compatible API and instrumented with Prometheus/Grafana — turning autoscaling, admission control, and capacity choices into reproducible evidence.
- Load-tested burst and long-context traffic: bounded queues held 100% delivery near 2s p95 under burst, and FP8 KV-cache was rejected after delivery dropped below ~70% — keeping the negative result as the decision.
CUDA/Triton GPU Kernel Lab
PyTorch baselines + A10G/H200- Built a reproducible CUDA/Triton benchmarking harness for LLM-shaped GPU kernels, validating correctness and measuring latency, bandwidth, and TFLOP/s against PyTorch/cuBLAS baselines.
- Reached ~90% of cuBLAS matmul throughput on H200 with a tuned Triton schedule, and recorded where a persistent-wave variant stayed below the baseline rather than reporting only the win.
Skills
- Professional (Production Experience)
- TypeScript · Go · Python · SQL · React · AngularJS → React Migration · Node.js · GraphQL / REST · Cypress E2E Testing · CI/CD Automation · Performance Optimization · Architecture Design · Cross-Functional Leadership
- Self-Directed / Lab
- AWS (VPC, IAM, EC2, ALB) · Terraform · Kubernetes (EKS) · Karpenter · Prometheus / Grafana · DCGM Exporter · GPU Capacity Planning · vLLM · LLM Serving · OpenAI-Compatible APIs · Autoscaling · Admission Control · KV Cache / Context Length · Quantization Evaluation · CUDA / Triton Benchmarking · Inference Load Testing (k6)
Education
M. E. Electrical Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Sep 2006 - Jun 2008
B. S. Electrical Engineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sep 2003 - Dec 2005