Chao Lin
@chaolin
Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead driving developer productivity and platform reliability.
United StatesWhat I'm looking for
I am a Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead with 10+ years building and scaling full-stack products, developer platforms, and SRE/infra tooling at companies including Google, Gusto, and Huawei.
I specialize in high-impact engineering: breaking monoliths into microservices, standing up Kubernetes-based platforms, and improving developer experience so teams ship faster and safer. I led teams of 4–8 engineers and partnered cross-functionally to turn ambiguous problems into measurable outcomes.
At Google I led a team to build an internal Developer Platform on GKE + Cloud Run for 200+ microservices, improved deploy frequency by 3x, and raised reliability to 99.97% for a critical workflow. At Gusto I modernized CI/CD, created paved-road templates, and reduced test runtimes and incident MTTR, directly improving developer velocity and platform stability.
I bring a strong SRE mindset, hands-on full-stack delivery (Go, Ruby, React, TypeScript), and a track record of mentoring engineers, setting technical roadmaps, and driving production readiness and security improvements.
Experience
Work history, roles, and key accomplishments
Led a team of 6 to build a GKE/Cloud Run-based internal Developer Platform for 200+ microservices, increasing deploy frequency 3x and reducing new-service spin-up from weeks to <2 days; drove multi-region Go/gRPC service improvements that raised reliability from 99.5% to 99.97% and cut p95 latency 40%.
Drove developer experience and platform reliability by modernizing CI/CD (Buildkite+K8s) to cut build time ~55% and rollback time to <5 minutes; delivered paved-road templates and testing optimizations that reduced end-to-end test runtime from 90 to 25 minutes and lowered incident MTTR 20%.
Built customer-facing Benefits product features in Rails + React that increased enrollment completion ~15% and reduced support tickets ~20%, and implemented integrations and reconciliation jobs to automate carrier data workflows.
Software Engineer
Huawei
Jun 2012 - Jul 2013 (1 year 1 month)
Contributed to Android-based smartphone OS components in C/C++ and Java, optimizing a background service to improve battery life ~8–10% in benchmarks and collaborating with hardware/QA to resolve device-specific issues.
Education
Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework
University of Southern California
Master of Science, Computer Science
Completed a Master of Science in Computer Science focusing on advanced topics relevant to systems and software engineering.
Zhejiang University of Technology
Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science
Earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with foundational coursework in software engineering and systems.
Tech stack
Software and tools used professionally
Sidekiq
GitHub
Kubernetes
Jenkins
CircleCI
GitHub Actions
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Gmail
Node.js
Spring Boot
Ruby on Rails
Next.js
Tailwind CSS
Material-UI
Redis
Terraform
Webpack
JavaScript
Java
ES6
JSON
Kafka
Grafana
Prometheus
OpenTelemetry
Datadog
GraphQL
gRPC
Elasticsearch
RSpec
JUnit
React Testing Library
OAuth2
NGINX
s3-lambda
SQL
Buildkite
Vite
Trunk
k6
Availability
Location
United StatesAuthorized to work in
Job categories
Skills
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