Gene Lai
Redmond,Washington
Summary
Backend engineer specializing in distributed systems, storage infrastructure, and query engines, with experience at Amazon (S3, Quick Suite) and Visier. Experienced in building and scaling high-throughput, low-latency systems, improving data durability and availability, and optimizing performance across multi-million record workloads. Strong ownership in delivering end-to-end solutions involving concurrency, data integrity, and large-scale system design.
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
Work History
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon - Quick Suite
Redmond, Washington
02.2026 - Current
- Designed and implemented support for connectors to customer MCP servers within VPC environments, enabling Quick Suite (chat, dashboards, workflows) to securely access private data sources and significantly expand platform capabilities.
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon - S3 Index Control Plane
Vancouver, British Columbia
09.2021 - 02.2026
- Led integration of S3 Index backups and hash-based data integrity checks into scale-up and data rescue workflows, eliminating reliance on live replicas and reducing customer traffic contention, latency spikes, and MTTR during recovery scenarios.
- Established guardrails and validation mechanisms to improve confidence in backup durability, driving adoption of S3 Index backups across multiple services and unblocking critical initiatives to enhance durability and availability (e.g., zero-replica partition rescue, concurrent multi-factor scale-up).
- Designed and implemented a hardware distribution layer to spread data across heterogeneous infrastructure, enabling migration from bare metal to EC2-backed storage fleets and improving resilience during capacity constraints.
- Enabled S3 to navigate large-scale capacity challenges by supporting flexible hardware utilization, reducing dependency on specialized infrastructure and improving scalability of the storage engine fleet.
- Built a “lock intent” mechanism for cross-cell data migration and integrated it into control plane workflows, ensuring correctness of partition and routing metadata critical to S3 data availability and durability.
Senior Software Developer
Visier Inc.
Vancouver, Canada
07.2016 - 09.2021
- Designed and implemented per-subject data start/end date support across heterogeneous datasets, coordinating cross-team dependencies and ensuring backward compatibility, helping retain at-risk customers.
- Built a high-performance property history engine for large-scale, time-based queries (100K+ entities over multi-year ranges), reducing worst-case latency to ~1s through dynamic sampling and optimized execution.
- Improved query performance by ~3× by redesigning parallelization and sharding strategies, maximizing CPU utilization while preserving correctness for key-based aggregations.
- Optimized cross-table queries on multi-million row datasets by introducing precomputed metadata and indexed access patterns, reducing execution time from ~10s to ~3s.
- Developed an internal query tracing tool to debug engine execution at the record level, significantly improving developer productivity while keeping runtime overhead under 5%.
- Contributed to backend design of career path analytics features, balancing data security constraints with the need for globally meaningful insights.
- Drove performance benchmarking and profiling efforts to ensure scalability and low-latency execution across core engine features.
Product Engineer
Texas Instruments
07.2015 - 08.2015
- Identified and fixed incorrect software commands in IC testing workflows that risked long-term damage to test equipment, improving reliability and preventing potential hardware failures.
- Reduced test execution time for select validation processes, improving efficiency of automotive IC testing operations.
- Authored technical documentation and training materials to support knowledge transfer and onboarding of future engineers.
Education
Master's Degree - Computer Engineering
The University of British Columbia
01-2015
Bachelor's Degree - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Queen's University
01-2013
Awards
- Graduate Entrance Scholarship
- First Class Honors
- Dean's Scholar
Timeline
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon - Quick Suite
02.2026 - Current
Software Development Engineer II
Amazon - S3 Index Control Plane
09.2021 - 02.2026
Senior Software Developer
Visier Inc.
07.2016 - 09.2021
Product Engineer
Texas Instruments
07.2015 - 08.2015
Master's Degree - Computer Engineering
The University of British Columbia
Bachelor's Degree - Electrical and Computer Engineering
Queen's University