================================================================================ ROCK LIANG - RESUME ================================================================================ CONTACT INFORMATION Email: rock@riotpiao.com Portfolio: https://riotpiao.com GitHub: https://github.com/rockliang ================================================================================ PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY ================================================================================ 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. ================================================================================ EXPERIENCE ================================================================================ --- 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. --- 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 --- 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 --- 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 --- 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 ================================================================================ TECHNICAL SKILLS ================================================================================ 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 ================================================================================ EDUCATION ================================================================================ 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 ================================================================================