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Charlie Tran
Engineering lead and full stack developer
After the successful exit of the startup that I helped lead, I’m looking for my
next role that would ideally be a hybrid of senior engineering and leadership.
- 15+ years experience as a software developer.
- 6+ years experience as an engineering manager with 4-8 direct reports.
- Highly proficient in object-oriented programming with Golang, Ruby and Javascript,
MySQL and PostgreSQL DB management, AWS infrastructure, and generally running web apps at scale
Unity (https://unity.com)
August 2021 - January 2024
- Joined Unity as Senior Director of Engineering via Parsec acquisition
- Led all engineering for Parsec as well as SyncSketch, a web-based media collaboration & annotation tool
Parsec (https://parsec.app)
May 2019 - August 2021
- Joined Parsec as an early engineer to lead the backend and infrastructure engineering efforts for a premium, gaming-focused remote desktop solution
- Rewrote a prototype NodeJS/Python REST backend to a serverless Golang API REST + WebSockets architecture
- Scaled from ~100k concurrent realtime users to millions while reducing AWS costs by 50%
Consulting & independent projects
November 2017 - May 2019
- Consulted as a senior engineer for NYC startups. Work included NodeJS REST
& GraphQL backends, Postgres database admin, customer data migration,
cloud infrastructure, and recruiting.
- Attended the Fall 2018 12-week batch at The Recurse Center, a community
of self-directed programmers.
Studied 2D game design, 3D VR/AR app development in Unity, and graphics shader
programming.
Vimeo (https://ott.vimeo.com)
Senior Director of Engineering • June 2016 - Oct 2017 • New York, NY
- Joined Vimeo via its acquisition of VHX
- Some things I shipped at Vimeo:
- API-based integrations of the VHX Ruby on Rails app into the Vimeo PHP stack
to begin combining our media assets and customer databases
- Growing both backend & frontend teams by 50% and organizing them into
cross-functional teams focused on product objectives instead of tech stacks
- A scaling & performance initiative for the Rails app stack to handle the
post-acquisition 10x traffic increase
- A custom video transcoding pipeline running on AWS to add support for 4K/HDR
video, decreasing our transcoding costs by 50% and improving playback quality
- Reworking our Java-based video streaming servers to allow for live-encoded
DRM and adaptive streaming
- Migration of the Rails app and microservices to Docker containerization
VHX (https://www.vhx.tv)
Director of Engineering • Aug 2013 - June 2016 • Brooklyn, NY
- Lead a team of 8 engineers that took a streaming video product from MVP to
acquisition
- Some things I shipped at VHX:
- A payments infrastructure for our online video marketplace with thousands
of sellers and millions of customers, compliant with federal and
international law
- In-app purchasing for all our sellers’ apps on iOS, Android, and Roku,
which boosted seller revenue by 200%
- An upgrade for our streaming video infrastructure from progressive H264 to
encrypted Apple HLS
- Automation of our Continuous Integration setup, allowing engineers to
deploy to production dozens of times a day and provision test servers via
a custom chat bot
- A zero-downtime credit card migration of 1 million+ paying customers
between providers (Balanced to Stripe)
Consulting
March 2011 - July 2013 • New York, NY
- Worked as a PHP, Ruby, & Javascript developer consultant for several NYC
agencies. Projects included:
Pre-2011 experience available upon request
Education
California State University, Long Beach
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Film Production (Directing & Cinematography)