Steve Chien
Jupiter,FL
Summary
Entrepreneurial and driven executive, with over 25 years hands-on industry expertise in architecture, development, delivery, and management of large distributed systems in domestic and international marketplaces. Strong team leader and motivator who interacts effectively with individuals across the spectrum of social backgrounds and cultures. Facilitator and builder of world-class technology development and management teams in both start-up and scaled growth stage.
Overview
28
28
years of professional experience
Work History
VP of Architecture and Cloud Services
SafeGuard Cyber
02.2021 - 05.2023
- Introduced Traefik to the Docker Swarm-based platform to improve traffic routing and load balancing capabilities.
- Led the architecture team in designing and implementing a Single-Sign-On solution to enhance the application authentication process. This solution was built on OAuth2 and OpenID Connect, with Auth0 serving as the identity provider.
- Aided the architecture and application teams in creating multiple social network integrations, including MS365 Email, Telegram, Line Works, and more.
- Introduced and conducted training for the teams on OpenTelemetry traces and metrics development, significantly improving the observability of the entire platform and applications. Datadog was deployed as the backend data collection and analytics solution.
- Collaborated with the architecture team and DevOps to overhaul the entire platform, transitioning from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, and introduced a new CI/CD platform using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD.
- Restructured and automated the application deployment process, transitioning it from the initial ad-hoc approach to one based on Terraform and Ansible. The project, including deployment automation, data migration, and two new sites in Europe, was completed in approximately 9 months.
- Headed the DevOps team in establishing two primary and two disaster-recovery sites across four distinct AWS regions, maintaining round-the-clock operations.
- Established and guided the performance benchmark team, oversaw the formulation of comprehensive benchmark strategies, measured critical indicators, and identified areas requiring enhancement. In less than three months, the team successfully improved the throughput of M365 Email integration by a remarkable threefold.
- Led infrastructure and data migration projects such as ElasticSearch (v.6 to v.7 for over 200M+ documents), Docker Swarm (v.16 to v.20), etc.
- Hired and managed senior architects and developers to maximize productivity while training staff on best practices and frameworks.
Partner and Principal Engineer
Product Lab
06.2012 - 02.2021
- Architected, built, and managed the High Availability (HA) clusters for MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Kafka for different product lines and cloud services.
- Spearheaded container-driven development for large-scale social media data collections and analytics platforms based on OpenShift/Kubernetes, Cassandra, Elaticsearch, Hadoop, Kafka, etc.
- Designed and executed data solutions by utilizing Apache Storm to manage streams of data.
- Assisted the DevOps team in deploying OpenStack and OpenShift as the chosen cloud platform for application hosting and orchestration.
- Constructed and managed the HDFS/Hadoop cluster using the Hortonworks distribution as the data storage platform.
Implemented the data collection subsystem for an internal data analytics platform based on Hive and HBase. - Lead strategic planning to achieve business goals by prioritizing technology platforms and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of existing and future technologies.
- Develop and execute the disaster recovery and business continuity plan, including locations across both the East and West coasts in US.
Senior Management Staff
GSI Commerce
04.2009 - 06.2012
- A year on the road with a senior consultant team for the merge-and-acquisition of the next generation eCommerce platform. Visited and negotiated with major eCommerce platform vendors such as IBM, Intershop, Demandware, Magento, etc. In the end, GSI invested in Intershop and formed strategic partnership for the US market.
- In charge of the development and maintenance of the eCommerce platform that boosted the online business for all clients.
- Led the development team in the benchmarking and optimization efforts for the flagship eCommerce platform.
- Championed and guided the agile software development process to help teams to delivery software faster, improve the ability to manage changing customer priorities, and ultimately increases the productivity.
- Approved, prioritized, and controlled projects, staffing, and resource allocations.
CTO/VP of Engineering and Service Operation
Moka LLC
04.2008 - 04.2009
- Managed the R&D, support, and service resources and projects in both US and China.
- Led the teams in developing the SMPP and CMPP gateways to connect to telecom services around the globe. Built the language translation services and integrated with the world's leading translation engines to provide real-time translation solutions over phones and computers.
- Managed and architected real-time translation solutions over SMS and instant messengers. Led the R&D teams in both US and China to develop highly efficient translation pre-processors based on acognitive knowledge base to handle the local dialogs and slang to improve the accuracy of translation.
- Established a multi-lingual 24 x 7 support team in Chengdu, China to service clients around the globe. The support team was also responsible for working with the development teams in both US and China on product quality insurance tasks.
- Presented project plans and status updates to partners and customers.
- Recruited, placed, and oversaw project staff in both US and China.
Senior Manager
Hong Kong Exchanges And Clearing Ltd
03.2003 - 04.2004
- Led both architecture and application teams on middle-tier projects for one of the major financial organizations in Asia.
- Managed the resources and planned all development activities for the middle-tier layer.
- ·Architected the middle-tier platform under strict requirements of security, performance, scalability, and resilience. Netegrity SiteMinder and iPlanet Directory Server were integrated as the PKI solution for authentication and authorization. iPlanet Application Server clustering architecture was adapted for performance and scalability considerations. Veritas HA was used to provide high data and application availability. SAN technology was deployed for data synchronization between the production and disaster-recovery sites.
- Standardized the application framework, including I/O validation, data access, caching, exception handling …etc, on the J2EE platform. Provided standard-based access channels (e.g. browser or in-house developed ISO-15022 application gateway) over the private WAN for all participants. Worked with the team on the functional, design, and technical specifications based on the SDLC standard established for the IT organization. Helped and mentored the team on the J2SE/J2EE application debugging and performance tuning skills.
- Led 24x7 middle-tier production support team. Achieved 100% yearly system availability starting from the middle of Mar. ‘03. This was the first time record for the Clearing IT.
- Worked and coordinated with vendors (e.g. Sun and IBM) on numerous technical issues related to OS, application server, security, database, and message-queuing systems.
- Developed proposals and presentations for internal and external audiences.
Development Manager/Senior Principal Engineer
InterWorld Corp
09.1995 - 02.2003
- Designed and architected the foundation of the InterWorld eCommerce platform.
- Delivered system-level C++ class libraries to shield the differences of operating systems (Windows and UNIX), web servers (IIS and Netscape Enterprise Server) and databases (Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and MS SQL Server) from vertical applications on all supported platforms (Win32, Solaris, and HP-UX). It covered the multithreading (Win32, Solaris, POSIX, and DCE), sockets (Win32 and BSD), security (hashing, encryption/decryption, and SmartCard), file-systems, I18N, Internet protocols (SMTP and HTTP/HTTPS) …etc. Provided the Java-based synchronization, security, web, and Internet-related libraries when porting the product suites to the J2EE platform.
- Architected and developed InterWorld’s own proprietary application server in the early days of the Internet eCommerce wave. It ran the generic application framework and eCommerce applications on different OS platforms neutrally. It’s a highly parallelized and multi-threaded application server written in C++. It exhibited high scalability on SMP machines (almost linear from 2 to 16 CPUs).
- An application protocol level load-balancer written in C++ which balanced loads among web and application server farms for the performance and availability considerations. It worked with both HTTP and HTTPS protocols and supported HTTP 1.0/1.1, sticky cookie/cookie-less session, round-robin/least-connection algorithms, adaptive caching, DoS (Denial of Service) prevention, telnet-based management …etc.
- Designed and implemented the vendor-independent layer (called Enterprise API) as the glue between InterWorld eCommerce suites and the underlying MOM (message-oriented middleware) providers. The first plug-in implementation was based on the webMethods Enterprise Server Suites. The webMethods Enterprise Server Suites and B2B/Integration Server were used to integrate different enterprise applications (SAP, J.D. Edwards, EDI …etc) and B2B marketplaces (Ariba and CommerceOne) for the clients.
- Led the team on porting the C++/Win32 based eCommerce product suites to Solaris 2.x. Ported Solaris 2.x implementations to HP-UX 10.2 afterwards. Standardized the development environments on both Windows and UNIX platforms. Helped to port and re-architected C++-based products to J2EE environments on BEA WebLogic 6.x/7.x and IBM WebSphere 4.x in a record time.
- Worked with Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard labs on different benchmark projects. Identified the performance and scalability issues either vertically or horizontally and analyzed the benchmark data. Greatly improved the overall performance and scalability of the products over time by making the software more paralleled and optimizing the hot spots of the code.
- Assisted IT on various UNIX platform management projects, including OS administration (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and Linux), firewall configuration (Linux IP-Chain), NIS/NFS management, OpenSSH client/server setup, Samba …etc.
- Conducted training programs and recommended improvements to upper management to enhance effectiveness.
Education
Master of Science - Computer Science
New York University
New York, NY11.1995
Bachelor of Science - Power Mechanical Engineering
National Tsing-Hua University
Hsing-Chu, Taiwan06.1991
Skills
- Technology Leadership
- Team Building
- Service Delivery
- Program Oversight
- Research Development
- Performance Optimization
- Datacenter Management
Timeline
VP of Architecture and Cloud Services
SafeGuard Cyber
02.2021 - 05.2023
Partner and Principal Engineer
Product Lab
06.2012 - 02.2021
Senior Management Staff
GSI Commerce
04.2009 - 06.2012
CTO/VP of Engineering and Service Operation
Moka LLC
04.2008 - 04.2009
Senior Manager
Hong Kong Exchanges And Clearing Ltd
03.2003 - 04.2004
Development Manager/Senior Principal Engineer
InterWorld Corp
09.1995 - 02.2003
Master of Science - Computer Science
New York University
Bachelor of Science - Power Mechanical Engineering
National Tsing-Hua University
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