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Kevin Van

@kevinvan

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Staff software engineer specializing in scalable real-time messaging and reliability.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a Staff/Backend role where I can lead distributed, real-time systems—raising reliability and observability, optimizing performance, and mentoring engineers while delivering multi-region resilience at scale.

Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience designing distributed systems, real-time platforms, and scalable backend infrastructure. I’m known for reliability, observability, performance optimization, and multi-region systems, with a track record of shipping and improving critical production services.

At Slack, I architected Slack’s Real-Time Messaging platform and sustained sub-500ms delivery for 10M+ daily users. I redesigned org-wide event routing for Unified Grid, optimized channel server fan-out and admin server routing to 16 million channels per host, and strengthened multi-region failover to restore ownership within 20 seconds during regional outages.

I also hardened exactly-once delivery and ordering guarantees using Java, Kafka, Redis, idempotency keys, acknowledgments, and integration tests, preventing duplicates across global 10M+ daily-active-user traffic. I mentor engineers and align cross-functional stakeholders through design reviews and code reviews while building practical load-testing frameworks to validate 2x–5x traffic spikes before production.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Staff Software Engineer

Current

Slack

Feb 2024 - Present (2 years 4 months)

Architected Slack’s real-time messaging platform (Channel/Gateway/Admin/Presence Servers) in Java and WebSockets, sustaining sub-500ms delivery for 10M+ daily users. Led multi-region routing, scaled to 16M channels per host, and strengthened exactly-once ordering using Kafka/Redis/idempotency, alongside global load testing and mentorship.

Java Python WebSockets Kafka Redis Vitess AWS Envoy Consul

Senior Software Engineer

Slack

Jul 2021 - Feb 2024 (2 years 7 months)

Owned backend reliability and scalability for SlackTrace/OpenTelemetry and notification delivery, achieving 100% trace fidelity and reducing triage time 30% via end-to-end tracing across clients and Elasticsearch/Grafana. Completed Slack’s Vitess migration and optimized keyspaces, replicas, and Memcached to sustain 2.3M QPS with 2ms median and 11ms p99 latency.

Java Python OpenTelemetry Vitess MySQL VTGates MemCached Elasticsearch Grafana

Software Engineer

Shift

May 2016 - Jun 2021 (5 years 1 month)

Built customer-facing used-car marketplace and internal operations systems using React/TypeScript, Go, PostgreSQL, and AWS to help power $637M annual revenue in 2021. Delivered backend microservices for inventory/pricing/transactions and improved reliability through production-grade CI/CD and monitoring, enabling 3x year-over-year revenue growth.

React TypeScript Go PostgreSQL AWS REST APIs Microservices CI CD Agile Third Party Integrations

Software Engineer

Center for Advanced Transportation Technology Laboratory

May 2010 - Apr 2016 (5 years 11 months)

Built traffic data visualization features for the RITIS transportation dashboard using JavaScript/Leaflet and REST APIs, improving incident monitoring and daily operational analysis for transportation agencies. Developed real-time data ingestion and ETL workflows with Python/SQL and delivered congestion analytics reporting tools to reduce manual data preparation and accelerate turnaround.