ChiaMin Liu (liuliu)

Senior Software Engineer, Backend & Platform

About Me

Senior Backend / Platform Engineer with 6+ years of experience designing and building cloud-native backend systems, shared platform capabilities, and production infrastructure on AWS and EKS. Experienced in operating high-traffic services serving 2.5M+ users and ~10K peak RPS, with deep focus on system design, authentication, authorization, API design, performance, reliability, CI/CD, and observability.

Strong track record of turning ambiguous business requirements, production bottlenecks, and repeated integration work into scalable engineering systems: designed reusable authentication and service bootstrap patterns across ~20 backend services, reduced critical service latency by up to 77%, improved throughput from 300 to 500 RPS, resolved high-traffic database bottlenecks, and reduced CI/CD pipeline time from 40 minutes to 20–25 minutes.

Experiences

Senior Backend Software Engineer

Dec 2023 - Present

President Chain Store Corporation(PCSC), Web Portal, APP

  • Owned backend and platform services for a high-traffic web portal and mobile app serving 2.5M+ users and ~10K peak RPS on AWS + EKS, ensuring reliable authenticated user journeys during campaign and push-notification traffic spikes of ~200K users.
  • Designed and built the company’s core post-login authorization service from 0 to 1, defining service boundaries, API access validation, token handling, and identity lifecycle management for business-critical membership and authorization flows.
  • Designed reusable OIDC/SSO integration patterns through authentication SDKs and API service templates adopted by ~20 backend services, reducing authentication integration and service bootstrap effort by ~80% while improving consistency across teams.
  • Led performance baselining, load testing, and tuning for authenticated authorization services, reducing critical endpoint latency by up to 77% and increasing throughput from 300 to 500 RPS.
  • Investigated and resolved a complex multi-service production incident during traffic spikes, reducing DB CPU from >85% to 20–30%, eliminating timeouts, and lowering operational risk for login-dependent flows.
  • Standardized IaC-based CI/CD workflows, CloudWatch dashboards/alarms, centralized logging, and audit logging across Spring Boot and Python backend services, cutting pipeline time from 40 minutes to 20–25 minutes and reducing incident investigation time by ~30%.
  • Designed and operated a shared redirect service across web and mobile entry points, covering routing rules, whitelist validation, SSO handoff, Kafka-based asynchronous event delivery, and click-tracking flows for hundreds of pages, dozens of brands, and millions of product cards.
  • Tech:
    • Languages: Python, Java
    • Frameworks: FastAPI, Spring Boot
    • Datastores: PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB, DocumentDB
    • Cloud/Infra: AWS (EKS, S3, SQS, SNS, Lambda, CloudWatch, MediaConvert)
    • Tooling: Terraform, Helm, Docker, Kubernetes, Istio
    • Testing/Perf: k6, Vegeta

Backend Software Engineer

Apr 2020 - Nov 2023
  • Owned backend APIs for a 100K+ user online learning platform with ~4K DAU, supporting revenue- and retention-critical workflows across cart, payment, learning progress, membership, internal admin workflows, revenue sharing, and coupon systems.
  • Upgraded a Laravel monolith from v7 to v10 in 2 months through incremental migration, compatibility validation, and unit-test coverage, reducing legacy framework risk and improving API p99 latency by 20%.
  • Resolved critical MySQL performance bottlenecks through request-path profiling, EXPLAIN analysis, index tuning, and schema refactoring, reducing hot-path query time from 10–20 seconds to ~1 second and improving key workflow responsiveness.
  • Operated the AWS production stack across ALB, EC2, and RDS, covering CI/CD, autoscaling, CloudWatch dashboards/alarms, load testing, release verification, and post-release monitoring to improve availability and release safety.
  • Improved monitoring and incident response with Slack alerting, reducing MTTD by ~80% and shortening issue detection time for user-facing and operational flows.
  • Built asynchronous backend workflows with SQS + Lambda for LINE notifications and personalized recommendations, contributing to repeat engagement initiatives that improved retention by ~20%.
  • Tech:
    • Languages: PHP, JavaScript, Python
    • Frameworks: Laravel, Lumen, Vue, Nuxt
    • Datastores: MySQL, SQLite
    • Cloud/Infra: AWS (EC2, ALB, RDS, SQS, Lambda, CloudWatch, ECR, S3)
    • Tooling: Docker, Docker Swarm, OpenAPI/Swagger
    • Testing: PHPUnit

Skills

Backend Engineering

  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • PHP
  • Laravel
  • RESTful API Design
  • Authentication & Authorization
  • OIDC / SSO

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Amazon EKS
  • Kubernetes
  • Istio
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Helm
  • ALB / ELB
  • EC2
  • Lambda
  • S3

Databases & Caching

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • DynamoDB
  • DocumentDB
  • Query Optimization
  • Index Tuning
  • EXPLAIN Plan Analysis

Platform, Reliability & Observability

  • CI/CD
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • CloudWatch
  • Centralized Logging
  • Audit Logging
  • Load Testing
  • Incident Response
  • Performance Tuning

Architecture & Integration

  • System Design
  • Service Boundary Design
  • Distributed Systems
  • Event-driven Workflows
  • Kafka
  • SQS
  • SNS
  • API Service Templates
  • Cross-team Platform Enablement

Tools

  • GitHub Actions
  • OpenSearch
  • Nginx
  • Ansible
  • Swagger / OpenAPI
  • k6
  • Vegeta

Projects

Side projects and tools.

(RUST) Documentation Embedding - Rust CLI for document embedding and Qdrant-based semantic search, demonstrating vector search, CLI tooling, and AI infrastructure experimentation.
(Python3) ChatGPT Token Usage Calculator - Python utility for estimating prompt token usage before API calls, supporting cost-aware LLM workflow design.
(Docker) Dockerize Templates - Reusable Docker templates for common backend stacks, standardizing local development setup and reducing project bootstrap effort.

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA)

2023 - 2026
AWS (AWS03666006)

Validates core AWS architecture skills across networking, compute, storage, security, and reliability best practices.

OSS Contributions

Open source contributions.

actix/examples - Community examples showing Actix ecosystem usage.
openai-cookbook - Examples and guides for using the OpenAI API.
design-patterns-for-humans-zh-TW - Traditional Chinese translation of design patterns.

Education

BSc in Computer Science

2015 - 2019
Chiayi University