Kris Chou
Senior Backend Engineer, Software Architect, Tech Lead
WORK EXPERIENCE
Senior Backend Engineer
PlaiLabs(Rough House Games) | 07/2023 – 12/2024
Plaiday (AI-powered text-to-image/video generation platform)
• Developed and scaled backend infrastructure to support real-time AI-driven media generation, enabling users to create high-quality images and videos from text prompts.
• Designed and implemented RESTful APIs to handle user requests, image processing, and asset management efficiently.
• Optimized performance and scalability by deploying GPU clusters for AI inference, later transitioning to GKE clusters for cost-effective, auto-scaling infrastructure.
• Built event-driven architectures using Pub/Sub and Redis for job queuing and distributed processing.
• Integrated GCP services (Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, CloudSQL) to streamline AI model deployment, media storage, and authentication.
SaltAI (Next-generation AI workflow automation platform)
• Engineered a backend system to orchestrate AI-driven workflows, allowing users to design and execute complex automation pipelines.
• Developed business logic layers and API endpoints in Python, FastAPI, and Django, enabling seamless communication between the AI engine and client applications.
• Designed and maintained PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases, optimizing schema design and indexing for high-throughput data operations.
• Deployed microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ensuring a scalable and resilient architecture.
• Automated deployment pipelines using GitLab CI/CD with ArgoCD, enabling seamless feature rollouts with rollback capabilities.
• Worked closely with AI Engineers, DevOps, and frontend teams to ensure optimal workflow execution, API stability, and system scalability.
Tech Lead
MissionDev | 09/2022 – 06/2023
• Led a team of 6 senior software engineers to build the Grantor Program Manager service using Python/Django and React.
• Designed and developed RESTful APIs, ensuring high performance and scalability.
• Spearheaded project planning and roadmaps, working closely with cross-functional teams.
• Led critical technical discussions with stakeholders on system architecture and best practices.
• Implemented Terraform to manage cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP.
• Established engineering standards and best practices, including comprehensive documentation.
• Worked on data modeling for dynamic forms and resolved cross-database reference issues.
• Facilitated technical discussions within the team, unblocking developers across multi-functional teams.
Lead Backend Engineer
TitanX | 07/2021 – 07/2022
• Developed AI-powered chatbot and SaaS solutions integrated with real estate CRMs.
• Designed, architected, and rearchitected backend solutions for improved scalability and performance.
• Built conversation pipelines on AWS using Lambda, AppSync, Cognito, DynamoDB, SSM, OpenSearch, ECS, and RDS.
• Refactored and optimized Flask and Django REST APIs to improve response times and reduce latency.
• Implemented Terraform to provision and manage cloud infrastructure across AWS.
• Built centralized RESTful APIs with Serverless Framework for seamless integration with various services.
• Refactored existing React dashboards to enhance performance, maintainability, and scalability.
Senior Backend Engineer
useHeard | 04/2020 – 06/2021
• Developed and optimized ETL pipelines for data transformation and analytics using AWS Lambda, Google Datastore, and S3.
• Led technical decision-making for cloud platforms based on A/B testing (Google App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk, Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift, OpenSearch).
• Built CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, EC2, Beanstalk, CloudFront, and CloudWatch.
• Enhanced Node.js + PostgreSQL backend by fixing legacy issues, reducing technical debt, and improving performance.
• Contributed to React.js frontend, implementing new features and improving code quality.
Python | Data Engineer
Freelancer.com | 08/2017 – 04/2020
• Developed web backend solutions using Python Django, Flask, and FastAPI for mobile apps, data science, and business intelligence projects.
• Optimized and migrated Python/Django applications for improved performance and page speed.
◦ Caching, Serverless migration (Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda), Optimized DRF serializers, Django ORM tuning.
• Built data pipelines using Python, AWS, Snowflake, Sisense, Power BI, Google BigQuery, and Cloud Functions.
• Developed web scraping solutions with Python Scrapy, BS4, Selenium, and Puppeteer.
• Created business intelligence web applications using Django and Flask.
• Built cross-platform desktop applications with PyQt5 and Qt5 and mobile applications using C#, Qt5, and C++.
• Led a team of distributed developers to build and maintain web-based products.
Linux Software Engineer
Dalian Xinsol Enterprise Co., Ltd | 04/2013 – 06/2017
• Designed and built local network communication applications on Linux using C/C++ and Qt4.
• Developed IoT software solutions for internal enterprise systems.
• Created system and network monitoring applications with Qt C++.
SKILLS
Programming languages
Python, Javascript, TypeScript, C, C++, C#, HTML, CSS
Backend
Django, DRF, Flask, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Celery, REST, GraphQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, Asyncio, AWS(S3, SNS, SQS, Lambda, ECS, ECR, Batch, AppSync, Cognito, DynamoDB, RDS, CloudWatch, SSM, Code Pipeline, BeanStalk, CloudFront), GCP(AppEngine, Cloud Functions, Datastore, BigQuery, Pub/Sub), Heroku, Docker, Websockets, Oauth2
Front-end
HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap, Javascript, Typescript, jQuery, React.js, Redux, Vue.js, D3.js, Chart.js, Plotly, matplotlib, Dash, PyQt5, PySide2, etc.
Database
MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis
Cross-platform Development Frameworks
Qt/QML, Flutter, React Native
BI & Data Engineering
Python, Numpy, Pandas, MapReduce, Hadoop, Hive, Spark, AWS, SnowFlake, Sisense, Power BI, Tableau, Google BigQuery, Batch processing
EDUCATION
Bachelor Computer Science2013
Enhanced motion detection using hausdorff distance
Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
HOBBY
Fitness • Sports • Music
Bug hunting • Making friends
TYPICAL PROJECTS
https://salt.ai
Salt AI is a model-agnostic, visual-first AI workflow and orchestration platform designed to accelerate complex computational tasks in the life sciences—such as drug discovery, protein folding, and clinical trial development
(Python, Django, Flask, Websockets(channels), GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, GPU computing, ComfyUI, Huggingface, LLM, AI, Typescript, React)
https://app.titanx.ai
AI Chatbot for real estate investors.
Mentioned in work experience.
(Javascript, Typescript, Python, Node.js, React.js, Django, Flask, AWS, Lambda, GraphQL, NoSQL, SQL, Serverless, GCP, BigQuery, PowerBI)
https://www.flockaudio.com/downloads
Cross-platform desktop application to patch flockaudo devices.
The app communicates with REST API server to identify users and to manage user license information.
This project involved very complex customized UI and challenges across different platforms.
The app supports Mac and Windows officially and Linux if requested.
(Qt5, C++, IoT, Embedded system, REST)
https://useheard.com
Marketing/Advertising platform for musicians and artists.
Worked on fixing legacy bugs, api integration (facebook, spotify and youtube), additional features and improving sequelize ORM.
Worked on aws lambda funtions to add features and to fix existing bugs with python
Built CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, EC2, Beanstalk, CloudFront and CloudWatch for both backend and frontend
(Python3/AWS/GCP/Serverless/Node.js/PostgreSQL/Sequelize ORM/API)
https://api.scorbit.io
Python/Django backend to provide REST APIs to a mobile gaming platform
Worked on performance tuning, security and building features.
(Python 3/Django/DRF/PostgreSQL/Django ORM/Redis/Cacheops/Cachalot/Celery/Heroku)
https://openalpr.com
SaaS platform to provide ALPR(Automatic License Plate Recognition and vehicle recognition) service to end users.
Worked on main web server and a couple of microservices to get rid of bottlenecks, expanding features and fixing bugs to improve performance.
Overhauled features to improve performance and user experience, optimized DRF serializers, optimized REST API responses, optimized Django ORMs, applied caching for REST endpoints, queries, pages, fixed odd cache invalidation, applied permission check and throttling to prevent spaming,moved some REST endpoints to websockets, etc.
(Python2.7/Django/MySQL/DRF/ORM/Redis)
https://hicharile.com
Web solution to provide service for users to save their money by providing information related tax, fees, insurance fees according to customers’ regions through mobile app.
Worked on optimizing performance and pagespeed based on Google Pagespeed Insights.
Added middlewares(gZip and caching), minified static assets, optimized DRF serializers, converted animated gifs to mp4 and compressed, fixed misuse of loops in javascript, secured websites from SQL injection with proper use of raw queries(interpolation) in Django ORM.
(Django/SQLite3/HTML/CSS/Bootstrap /Scrapy)
https://hikster.com
Web application where hikers can plan their hiking, maps, blogs for tips and hints.
Worked on refactoring the entire website based on new design, added map solution to confirm the routes and also worked on code refactoring and cleaning to boost performance.
Optimized Django ORM and other django stuffs using django debug toolbar and other tools.
(Python/Django/PostgreSQL/Vue.js/Vuetify)
https://em13.com
Email cleaning service for email marketers.
Migrated Django v1.7 to v2.2, customized admin pages and connected Google API with the app.
(Python/Django/PostreSQL/Docker/Celery/Google API/Third party API)
https://cleanerlove.com
Website for the company that provides home cleaning service.
Rebuilt the front-end with new design and implemented mobile responsive design.
(Python/Django/SQLite3/Django tempalte/HTML/CSS/jQuery)
https://tybas-dance.com
Dance studio management system where students(trainees) can book their lessons, bill and schedule their lessons and also dance teachers can book the rooms for their lessons, etc.
Migrated from Django v1.7 to v 3.0, fixed a lot of bugs and added new features according to customers’ requests.
(Python/Django/PostgreSQL/Vagrant/Django template...)
More references for projects are available upon request
