Tony Duong

Tokyo, Japan → Toulouse, France (part-time freelance since Jun 2026)

Five-person backend team for a B2B cloud VR platform (real estate / housing) — turning photos and 3D data into immersive 360° panoramic content for 1,000+ companies.

• ▸Promoted to Team Lead in about a year on a five-person backend team; onboard new members, lead meetings, and reshape team rituals — cut unnecessary recurring meetings and revitalized the weekly "Product Dive" knowledge-sharing session.
• ▸Most awards nominations company-wide for the 2025–2026 period — the employee with the highest number of nomination submissions across the organization.
• ▸Made a core production job ~4× faster — a CPU-heavy 360°-to-cubemap conversion run 10,000+ times a day — by moving it off shared Sidekiq workers onto AWS Lambda; optimized the save flow so a single job dropped from ~2 minutes to ~10 seconds and a 50-image batch from ~12 minutes to under 2.
• ▸Cut Honeybadger error alerts from ~10,000 to under 300 in a two-week window through focused debugging and bug-fixing.
• ▸Built a custom Jira app for burndown and velocity charts — aggregating multiple DONE statuses and sprint-point fields across several Jira workspaces that default Jira couldn't configure.
• ▸Led a vulnerability assessment end to end — evaluating security firms, scoping, and running the engagement — partly as the fastest route to a bird's-eye view of the codebase.
• ▸Upgraded Rails 7.1 → 7.2 across a multi-database setup, repairing the many cross-database tests it broke along the way.
• ▸Owned several AI image features end-to-end — generative content removal/placement and an AI contextual chat — building CRUD APIs, file-attachment handling, and technical specs; re-architected the panorama-enhancement pipeline from Lambda (CPU) to ECS (GPU).
• ▸Led infrastructure and system-design work on AWS — Step Functions, Lambda, API Gateway, ECS, and the ALB/VPC networking layer.
• ▸Automated API specification generation directly from source code, replacing a hand-maintained spec in a separate repo; migrated team documentation from Qiita to Notion.
• ▸Overhauled Datadog observability — ~120 monitors with consistent naming, ownership tags, and runbooks; rebuilt SLO/SLI dashboards and normalized 50+ alerts.
• ▸Established team coding rules (now embedded in AGENTS.md files) and helped weave AI into nearly every stage of the development workflow; perform safe weekly dependency upgrades using spec-driven development.
• ▸Represented Spacely in a TokyoDev interview; wrote four articles for the company tech blog: 360° cubemap ~4× faster (Sidekiq → Lambda), lost updates in Rails, Cursor productivity, Rails 7.1 → 7.2 upgrade.

Tokyo, Japan (remote from Enoshima)

Global digital consultancy — client engagements across varied stacks and domains; joined as Senior Backend Engineer (Ruby), promoted to Tech Lead after ~1 year.

• ▸Stepped up as backend lead on a project for a major Japanese automobile company when teammates rolled off, and saw it through to delivery over roughly six months.
• ▸Recovered overwritten production data using Aurora Point-in-Time Recovery after a deployment mistake — and learned the discipline that makes sure it never happens twice.
• ▸Built a ChatGPT-powered RAG chatbot prototype for a major Japanese conglomerate, working alongside an AI engineer with Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect, fully provisioned in Terraform.
• ▸Earned around seven AWS certifications through Monstarlab's certification support — theoretical grounding that's paid dividends ever since.
• ▸Led an eight-engineer backend team across the Tokyo and Vietnam offices on a from-scratch build for a demanding, high-standards client — balancing quality against a tight schedule and shipping the release on time.
• ▸Worked in a schema-first, three-layer architecture — a GraphQL BFF between the frontend and a Ruby on Rails gRPC backend, with code generated on both sides from shared proto schemas.
• ▸Built a reservation system integrated with Google Calendar (availability checks and slot booking) on top of complex application-side rules — roles, smart attendee assignment, and constrained sets of possible times.
• ▸Built an analytics feature on Google BigQuery (OLAP) — daily, weekly, and three-month views — with a daily aggregation job loading results back into the OLTP store for fast reads.

Ebisu, Tokyo, Japan

First full-time engineer at a startup building Offers, a job-matching platform for engineers and designers.

• ▸Helped build Offers, a job-matching platform for engineers and designers, working day to day with product managers and designers to take features from idea to ship.
• ▸Built a Slack integration that notified recruiters and job seekers in real time when a matching position came up.
• ▸Worked on Offers Magazine, a digital engineering-and-design magazine: built the frontend in Vue.js from designer hand-offs (often HTML/CSS) wired to real data, and got hands-on with AWS CloudFront, WAF, and S3 plus a WordPress headless-CMS backend.
• ▸Built a performant analytics tool on AWS Redshift, aggregating and extracting analytical data through complex SQL queries.
• ▸Started out following the senior engineer's lead and quickly grew into an engineer who proposed solutions and designed new features, not just implemented them.
• ▸Operated day to day in Japanese — spoken and written — making clear written communication a core strength; used Datadog and New Relic for observability.
• ▸Promoted within the first year and recognized as a roughly top-5% performer; grew from shipping fast to shipping well under a strong mentor.

Tokyo, Japan

Started as an intern, then offered a permanent full-time contract. Sole developer at a seven-person e-commerce business (Japanese martial-arts gear), building internal tooling from scratch.

• ▸Built a shipment system integrating the Shopify API with DHL, Japan Post, and FedEx, plus a parcel-tracking dashboard that normalized each carrier's API into one view.
• ▸Wrote accounting/revenue and tax-declaration tooling, Google Apps Script automations for the order pipeline, and Tampermonkey scripts to patch third-party UIs.
• ▸Shipped daily on Rails + PostgreSQL on Heroku as a one-person engineering team — then used the tools in the warehouse myself, which Jordy (CEO) credited with measurably moving the company's productivity forward.

Montreal, Canada

Telecoms company; master's internship.

• ▸Built a Unity VR game prototype integrating the company's internal video-call APIs, shipped as a client-facing demo alongside their telecoms platform.

Shirimono

Japanese-learning app, rebuilt from scratch and shipped on the App Store. AI-generated exercises (Claude Skills), Vertex AI TTS audio, a JLPT N2 course, public multi-locale resource pages, and CloudFront-served assets. Migrated the backend from Render to a single Hetzner VPS with Kamal, saving ~$60/month.

This site — blog + digital clone

A trilingual (fr/en/ja) Next.js 16 blog with a streaming Claude chat grounded in the site's content, a real-time ActionCable chat, and an automated translation pipeline (Claude Code + GitHub Actions) that translates new English posts into French and Japanese.

Axie Infinity gene overlay (earlier)

A Chrome and Firefox browser extension that pulled each Axie's genes from the API and overlaid them on marketplace listings the site didn't expose. Shared in the game's Discord, it hit hundreds of downloads a day and ~$30/day at peak via a one-time Stripe unlock.