Owen Zhang
Fremont,CA
Summary
Senior Support Engineer with 8+ years of experience providing enterprise-grade technical support for distributed systems and API platforms. Expert in troubleshooting complex production issues across cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, and authentication systems. Pioneer in deploying AI-powered automation solutions including Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for enhanced support operations. Proven track record partnering with engineering teams to drive product improvements, bug fix and reproduction, authoring technical documentation, and delivering customer-first support during high-impact production outage incidents.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Vault Support Engineer
HashiCorp (now IBM)
04.2023 - Current
- Deployed and integrated beta Vault Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers in development environments to enable AI-driven workflows, allowing LLMs to interact with Vault APIs for secret management, policy configuration, and operational tasks using natural language—pioneering early adoption of AI-first automation approaches in enterprise support operations
- Develop internal tool or script to increase support team efficiency with reproduction and perform root cause analysis.
- Served as primary technical point of contact for strategic enterprise customers, troubleshooting production-critical issues on HashiCorp Vault servers, Linux hosts and Kubernetes clusters, ensuring high availability for authentication, storage backbends, and API platforms
- Diagnosed distributed system failures involving compute, storage, and networking layers—including Kubernetes orchestration, load balancer configurations, TLS certificate issues, latency problems, and request-rate bottlenecks affecting mission-critical workloads
- Led performance tuning and scalability initiatives for high-throughput systems, mitigating bottlenecks from excessive authentication calls, short-lived token churn, Raft quorum write pressure, and misconfigured storage backbends
- Advised enterprise customers on production best practices including request rate controls, namespace and token usage patterns, high-availability architecture, Raft quorum sizing, and operational guardrails to prevent resource exhaustion
- Partnered closely with engineering teams to reproduce bugs, implement workarounds, and drive long-term product improvements—escalating recurring customer pain points with Solution Engineering team to influence feature requests and internal tooling enhancements.
Vault Support Engineer
HashiCorp
06.2021 - 04.2023
- Resolved API and CLI errors, permission issues, and performance degradation by analyzing system logs, telemetry data, audit trails, reducing time-to-resolution by providing root cause analysis and actionable solutions
- Delivered multi-cloud support across AWS, GCP, and Azure environments, troubleshooting IAM authentication, service accounts, load balancer configurations, and network policies to ensure seamless cloud-native deployments
- Guided developers and Vault administrators in understanding key Vault performance telemetry metrics (memory utilization, request handling rates, latency patterns) for building Prometheus and Grafana monitoring dashboards, enabling proactive operational insights and data-driven capacity planning
- Authored and maintained comprehensive internal and customer-facing knowledge base articles, including troubleshooting guides, error message deep-dives, configuration examples, and GitHub repositories with reusable reference implementations
Lead Technical Support
LT Security Inc.
04.2020 - 05.2021
- Architected and managed cloud infrastructure for 500+ NVR/DVR/IPC product firmware using AWS S3 and Glacier with lifecycle policies, eliminating file duplication and reducing corporate AWS storage costs by 25%
- Enhanced AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) security by implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) with Virtual MFA devices and integrating IAM access with Microsoft Active Directory for centralized identity management
- Conducted quality assurance testing and assessment of NVR/DVR/IPC firmware releases, identifying critical issues before deployment to prevent negative impact across thousands of IoT devices, improving overall product quality by 32%
Technical Support
LT Security Inc.
04.2016 - 03.2020
- Provided Tier 1 technical support to installers and end-users through remote access tools (TeamViewer, LogMeIn), resolving diverse technical issues across multiple products and time zones
- Troubleshot advanced networking issues for Network Video Recorders (NVR) and IP cameras, including domain registration, port forwarding configuration, and remote monitoring access setup
Education
MBA - Information Technology
Goldey-Beacom College
Wilmington, DE05.2020
Master of Science - Mechanical Engineering
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ05.2015
Bachelor of Science - Engineering
Northeastern Forestry University
Harbin, China06.2013
Skills
- AI & Automation
- Languages
- Cloud Platforms
- Containers Orchestration
- Infrastructure
MCP servers, AI workflows
Bash, Go, SQL, JavaScript
AWS, GCP, Azure
Kubernetes, Docker, Openshift, Helm
- Monitoring
- APIs & Auth
- Networking
- Databases
Terraform, Vault, Consul
Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog
REST, OAuth 20, SAML, JWT, Active Directory, Okta
TLS/SSL, load balancers, DNS
PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB
Websites
Certification
AWS Solutions Architect - Associate
HashiCorp Vault Operations Professional
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
Timeline
Senior Vault Support Engineer
HashiCorp (now IBM)
04.2023 - Current
Vault Support Engineer
HashiCorp
06.2021 - 04.2023
Lead Technical Support
LT Security Inc.
04.2020 - 05.2021
Technical Support
LT Security Inc.
04.2016 - 03.2020
Master of Science - Mechanical Engineering
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science - Engineering
Northeastern Forestry University
MBA - Information Technology
Goldey-Beacom College