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                        ROCK LIANG - RESUME
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CONTACT INFORMATION
Email: rock@riotpiao.com
Portfolio: https://riotpiao.com
GitHub: https://github.com/rockliang

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PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY
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Experience:
  6+ years building production-grade infrastructure, backend systems, and LLM 
  applications. Specialized in Kubernetes orchestration (Talos Linux, ArgoCD), 
  Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), distributed systems design, AWS scale 
  operations, and GPU-accelerated inference.

Core Competencies:
  Production Kubernetes (Talos, GitOps/ArgoCD, 99.2% uptime). Terraform IaC 
  with drift detection. AWS distributed systems (57+ regions). Golang backend 
  services. Observability (Prometheus/Grafana/Loki/Tempo). Message queuing 
  (Kafka/Temporal workflows). GPU inference (vLLM, 60% latency improvement). 
  Zero-trust networking (OIDC/RBAC).

Strengths:
  Owning systems end-to-end—design doc through oncall. Building fault-tolerant 
  platforms with 99.2% automation. Unblocking teams with clear technical 
  communication.

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EXPERIENCE
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SELF-HOSTED PRODUCTION (riotpiao.com)
DevOps / SRE / SDE
Home Lab | May 2025 — Present

Challenge & Solution:
  Built AWS from scratch at home on bare-metal Kubernetes—Talos Linux for 
  secure immutable OS, ArgoCD for GitOps pipeline automation, SOPS for 
  encrypted secrets management, cert-manager for PKI. Result: 
  production-grade multi-tenant platform with Kafka, PostgreSQL, S3, GPU LLM 
  inference, Temporal workflows in 4-node cluster.

Tech:
  • Kubernetes (Talos, ArgoCD) — Talos immutable, atomic updates, no SSH, full 
    GitOps state. ArgoCD automatic sync with drift detection. Cilium eBPF CNI.
  • Terraform + Kustomize — Declarative infrastructure. State management via 
    Terraform Cloud. Kustomize overlays for multi-env.
  • Secrets & Security — SOPS age encryption with git audit trail. Authentik 
    OIDC SSO with Kubernetes RBAC. cert-manager + Let's Encrypt (30d renewal, 
    7d pre-expiry alerts).

Infrastructure & Services:
  • Longhorn 3-replica block storage. MinIO S3-compatible API. CloudNativePG 
    PostgreSQL with pgvector for embeddings. vLLM GPU inference (Qwen3-32B, 
    60% latency vs baseline).
  • Observability stack: Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, Loki logs, 
    Tempo traces, OpenTelemetry. 99.2% uptime via monitoring automation.
  • Kafka/Redpanda streaming. Temporal workflows for fault-tolerant jobs. 
    Forgejo CI/CD with Docker registry. DinD runners for parallel builds.

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ROYAL BANK OF CANADA (RBC)
Lead Software Engineer
Toronto, ON | Nov 2024 — May 2026

Challenge & Solution:
  Deployments were manual and slow—teams blocked 2+ hours per release waiting 
  for provisioning. Standardized on Terraform Cloud for idempotent IaC. Built 
  Temporal workflows for multi-cloud orchestration with built-in retry logic 
  and idempotency keys. Reduced deploy time from 2 hours to 20 minutes, 
  achieved 99.2% automation.

Drift Detection & Reconciliation:
  • Built Kubernetes CronJob (Golang) to continuously detect and reconcile 
    Terraform state drift against actual infrastructure. Automatically 
    detects divergence (network policies, security groups, storage) and 
    triggers remediation without manual intervention.
  • Coordinated across 4 platform teams, unified 200+ microservices into 
    single IaC standard. Cut onboarding time for 12 teams.

Notifications & SLA:
  • Designed Slack notification service with Golang workers. Alerts on apply 
    failures, drift detection, provisioning bottlenecks. Operators resolve 
    issues in <5 minutes via notification-driven workflow.

Stakeholder Alignment:
  • Led requirement gathering across 4 platform teams. Translated technical 
    decisions for non-technical stakeholders. Secured buy-in for platform 
    migration. Unblocked 3 stalled projects by disambiguating specs.

Tech:
  • Golang, Kubernetes, Terraform Cloud, IaC, Distributed Systems
  • Slack API, multi-cloud orchestration, state drift reconciliation
  • Notification-driven operators, 99.2% automation

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AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)
Senior Software Engineer (Step Functions)
Seattle, WA | 2022 — 2024

Challenge & Solution:
  Owned Distributed-Map from design doc to production launch across 57+ 
  regions. Under tight deadline, introduced separate state in Map vs new 
  functions—simplified customer adoption. Built checkpoint recovery for 
  mid-workflow failures so customers resume without full re-run.

Distributed Systems Engineering:
  • Solved critical edge cases: race conditions in concurrent state updates, 
    dependent service failures, message deduplication, exactly-once semantics 
    across distributed workers.
  • Introduced JSON state input for larger payloads—unlocked new customer use 
    cases (batch processing, ML model serving, data pipelines).

Production Ownership & Reliability:
  • Full oncall ownership—built CloudWatch dashboards, wrote operational 
    runbooks, debugged production issues live. Achieved sub-100ms P99 latency 
    across 57+ regions and 20x burst traffic scaling.
  • Disaster recovery procedures and incident response. State management for 
    failed/retried jobs.

Tech:
  • Java, AWS Step Functions, DynamoDB state storage, gRPC, Distributed Systems
  • CloudWatch observability, ownership, disaster recovery, exactly-once delivery
  • 57+ regions, sub-100ms P99, 20x burst traffic

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NETFLIX TITUS (Container Orchestration)
Software Engineer Intern
Los Gatos, CA | May — Aug 2019

Challenge & Solution:
  Streamlined Personal Data Detection (PDD) to identify classified data 
  exfiltration anomalies—achieved 97.8% accuracy with minimal false positives. 
  Built fault-tolerant Golang connector for PDD integration with 28% p99 
  latency improvement over legacy implementation.

Compilation & Integration:
  • Re-integrated SmartRegex with CMake & C++ on Linux/Unix platforms. 
    Achieved 5x faster deployment through automated build pipeline and 
    dependency resolution.
  • Prevented classified data leakage across Netflix's distributed workload 
    platform.

Tech:
  • C++, CMake, Golang, Docker, pattern matching, fault tolerance
  • Build automation, 97.8% detection accuracy, 28% latency improvement

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NAV CANADA (Air Traffic Control Systems)
Summer Student
Ottawa, ON | May — Aug 2018

Challenge & Solution:
  Maintained enterprise CFPS web application in Agile development. Built 
  Django NOTAMJ polls app to meet iteration goals. Improved deploy stability 
  with Sonar code coverage analysis—reduced defect escape rate.

Frontend & User Experience:
  • Created FWGS weather briefing interface with ReactJS for Air Traffic 
    Control. Real-time meteorological data visualization for pilot briefings.
  • Deployed to Canadian airspace (50+ airports). Improved ATC 
    decision-making with cleaner weather briefing UX.

Tech:
  • ReactJS, Django, Agile methodology, Sonar code coverage
  • Weather data visualization, pilot decision support systems

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TECHNICAL SKILLS
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Languages:
  Golang, Java, Python, C++, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, Bash

Cloud & Infrastructure:
  Kubernetes (Talos Linux, k3s, ArgoCD GitOps)
  Terraform (IaC, state management, drift detection)
  Docker, OpenShift, AWS (DynamoDB, Step Functions, CloudWatch)

Distributed Systems:
  Temporal workflows, Kafka/Redpanda streaming
  gRPC, message queuing, exactly-once semantics
  State management, disaster recovery, idempotency

LLM & AI:
  vLLM (GPU inference, Qwen3-32B, 60% latency improvement)
  KServe orchestration, Ollama, TEI embeddings
  Vector databases (pgvector), model serving

Observability & Monitoring:
  Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (dashboards)
  Loki (log aggregation), Tempo (distributed tracing)
  OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, alerting & runbooks

Networking & Security:
  Authentik OIDC SSO, Kubernetes RBAC
  cert-manager TLS, SOPS encryption
  Cloudflare Tunnel (zero-trust), network policies
  PKI, service-to-service auth

Data & Storage:
  PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG, pgvector)
  DynamoDB, MinIO S3, Longhorn block storage
  Data modeling, exactly-once consumption

CI/CD & DevOps:
  Forgejo Actions, GitHub Actions
  Docker container registry, Kustomize
  GitOps, declarative infrastructure

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EDUCATION
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University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario
Master of Science in Computer Science (Software Systems)
2020 — 2021

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Honours)
2016 — 2020

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