Ricky Zheng

About

Backend/data engineer with hands-on production experience building a FastAPI Python service on AWS for real-time AI workflows (Postgres/Redis, containers behind API Gateway) with strong reliability practices (JWT auth, timeouts/retries, health checks). Has delivered AWS infrastructure using Terraform + GitHub Actions across environments, built Glue ETL pipelines into Snowflake with idempotent recovery, and modernized legacy batch workflows via parallel-run parity validation and phased cutovers.

Key Strengths

• Built and operated a production FastAPI service on AWS for real-time AI workflows (Postgres + Redis, containerized behind API Gateway)
• Reliability engineering: JWT/service tokens, early auth validation, strict timeouts, safe retries with backoff, defensive error handling
• Infrastructure and deployments via Terraform + GitHub Actions across dev/staging/prod with env-specific variables
• Serverless and container experience (Lambda, ECS/EKS) with autoscaling, resource limits, and monitoring for cost/performance balance
• AWS Glue ETL from S3/operational DBs into Snowflake with crawlers, schema versioning, validation, and idempotent replay
• Modernized legacy batch workflows via parallel runs, parity validation on historical data, phased cutover with feature flags and rollback
• SQL performance tuning: reduced a reporting query from minutes to seconds via composite indexing and join rewrites
• Production incident ownership: detected via batch/data freshness alerts, triaged upstream delay, mitigated with backfill reruns and improved dependency checks

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