• Research and implementation of soft-segment background removal of e-commerce product pictures using deep learning.

During my stint at the Ecosystem Services Department, I helped design and ship global scale web apps around the major ID platforms. I also worked horizontally across all ecosystem services (Points, Payments, Membership) to enhance technical quality across the board.

Notable projects:

• Design, develop and deploy a global-scale ID service layer using multi-regional kubernetes cluster with anycast routing using GCP. Service currently used by multiple Rakuten services across the globe, supporting hundreds of millions MAU.

• Ebates+ID integration: Helped speed up production readiness for integration of the new ID platform with Ebates. Deployed core components closer to the ID data-centers in GCP for a massive decrease in login latency using HAProxy for fault tolerance.

• GCP integration with Rakuten’s Data centers: As a consultant to the cloud and internal network teams, I helped setup and integrate GCP’s cloud interconnect to all ESD projects which required connectivity to on-premise resources.

Roles and responsibilities as architect:

• Cloud architect: Enforcing governance and principles of least privilege for all cloud users within the department; introduced real-time billing updates to senior management and also helped decrease yearly cloud bills by ~¥12 million. Introduced best practices for cloud security and consulted teams on optimal GCP usage and best practices.

• Release reviews: Lead weekly release reviews of Points, Payments and Membership sections. Enforced the 3 pillars of a successful release - safe, repeatable and stress-free. This helped reduce release troubles and increase fully automated releases.

• Mentorship: Mentored new engineers with their on-boarding and training, and organised training projects for interns from various Canadian universities as part of their co-op program. The training introduced them to new technologies, internal and external, and platforms including Docker, Kubernetes, Kotlin etc. as a way to help them get up to speed with ESD’s existing projects.

• Worked on the gameplay and engine layers, fixing flaky issues while porting and remastering South Park™: The Stick of Truth™ for PS4/Xbox One.