San Cao
Backend Engineer • Infrastructure

San Cao

Backend Engineer

caothesan@gmail.com houtaru thesancao

0x01 / Summary

Backend Infrastructure Engineer specialized in Database Reliability, High-Performance Messaging, and Observability. Expert in developing core infrastructure tools for large-scale data systems, including 18TB/day backup agents, zero-downtime migration protocols, and sub-second observability pipelines for 1,000+ DB clusters. Highly experienced with algorithms and data structures.

0x02 / Experience

Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

May 2022 -- Present
Zalo HCMC
  • — Engineered zero-downtime migration protocols and automated cross-DC replication for 1,000+ in-house DB clusters.
  • — Designed metrics ingestion pipeline at ~1M samples/sec with ~10s anomaly detection; architected Thanos long-term store, cutting query latency 40% and storage cost 3.5x.
  • — Encryption: added in-memory encryption to Memcached, securing PII for 70M+ MAU with <2% latency impact.
  • — Backup & Restore: engineered daily 10TB+ backup flow with automated recoverability tests and snapshot drift metrics vs prod/previous.
  • — Hermetic Build: created reproducible build pipeline from source to binary, deployed to 2,000+ DB nodes with zero-drift releases.
  • — Stack: C++, Java, Linux, NoSQL, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana, Apache Thrift, Docker.

Software Engineer Intern

May 2021 -- Nov 2021
VNG Corporation HCMC
  • — Developed new features and maintained a card-games called Truco for Argentinians on server side.
  • — Maintained tool used for analysing user behavior based on given metric log.
  • — Technologies: Java, Memcached, Python, Hadoop, Spark, MySQL.

0x03 / Education

Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City - University of Science

2018 -- 2022

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Advanced Program in Computer Science

  • — Published 2 research papers in AI (SRGAN & Video Classification) at NAFOSTED NICS and MediaEval 2020.

0x04 / Technical Skills

Languages

C/C++ Python Java Go SQL

Technologies

Linux Docker Prometheus Thanos Apache Thrift Message Queue NoSQL

Core Expertise

Distributed Systems Algorithms Data Structures System Reliability Engineering

0x05 / Projects

Free Contest

Problem Setter. Engineered high-quality competitive programming problems for weekly contests on the self-hosted FreeContest platform. Curated content for Vietnam National Olympiad in Informatics (VOI) candidates.

2019 -- 2021

cowboycoder.tech

A website sharing problem solution and code, as well as series of learning tips written or translated in Vietnamese.

2018

0x06 / Honours

Top 10 in AIOT Innovation Works 2021
Fourth prize in AI Challenge of AISocha 2020 2020
Second Prize in ACM-ICPC Vietnam Southern Provincial Contest 2018
Third Prize in Vietnamese National Olympiad in Informatics 2018
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