Tim Kwok

About

Backend/data engineer with strong AWS production experience spanning FastAPI microservices and large-scale data pipelines. Has delivered containerized Python services on EKS with Terraform/Helm/GitHub Actions, implemented robust auth/secrets practices, and owned ETL reliability (Glue/S3/Redshift) including incident response and idempotent reruns. Demonstrated SQL tuning on 50M-record ETL workloads to remove SLA misses and improve reliability.

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Production FastAPI backend design with JWT auth, RBAC, DI, async support, and centralized error handling
• Reliability engineering for services (retries with exponential backoff, consistent JSON errors, logging middleware)
• AWS platform delivery using EKS + ALB + RDS + ElastiCache with Terraform, Helm, and GitHub Actions CI/CD
• Scaling and cost optimization on Kubernetes (HPA, cluster autoscaler, right-sized node groups, aggressive scale-down using CloudWatch metrics)
• Secrets and configuration management at scale (AWS Secrets Manager, IAM-scoped access, runtime injection, automatic rotation)
• ETL/data pipeline engineering with Glue/S3/RDS/Redshift including schema evolution tolerance, validation, quarantine, and idempotent reruns
• Incident ownership for batch/data pipelines (CloudWatch + Slack alerting, log/metric triage, pausing downstream jobs, safe reruns)
• SQL performance optimization for large-scale ETL (50M records) using indexing, partitioning, query rewrites, and batching to eliminate missed SLAs