Hey, I'm Kevin!

Kevin Chen

I started working as a software engineer in 2015, focusing on Java, Spring, and Ruby on Rails. In 2018, I pivoted to Golang. Since 2024, TypeScript has been my primary language.

I consider home to be the DC Metro area, but these days I reside in Houston.

Currently, I work at Aspira, where I'm dedicated to building better digital experiences for folks who love the outdoors.


Experience

Where I’ve worked

Aspira

Sep 2024 – Present

Senior Software Engineer

  • Translated on-site state-park requirements into designs for versioned, conditional, and shareable reservation rules while pressure-testing the surrounding configuration and taxonomy models.
  • Cut typecheck time from 82 seconds to 4 seconds with remote caching, then led an 11-point CI/CD initiative and traced minute-long tests to dependency-injection barrel re-exports.
  • Redesigned Slack alarms, eliminated false-positive capacity alerts, added structured query logs, hardened load-balancer headers, and added safeguards around migrations and N+1 queries.
  • Set standards for documentation, code review, and AI context quality while piloting next-generation TypeScript, linting, and formatting tools.
  • Founded and continue to lead an AI guild with 5–10 regular attendees focused on agent models, reusable skills, and better codebase context.

Teaching Strategies

Sep 2022 – Sep 2024

Senior Software Engineer

  • Built a greenfield cloud platform for modernizing an early-childhood education product.
  • Led the design of a change-aware legacy-data migration into the new platform.
  • Mentored teams through the transition from REST to GraphQL.
  • Established telemetry, automated delivery, and infrastructure-as-code practices around the new platform.

The Drivers Cooperative

Mar 2022 – Sep 2022

Software Engineer

  • Implemented a geospatial dispatch-ranking service for driver assignment.
  • Built a real-time operations interface for vehicle tracking.

Care.com

Mar 2021 – Mar 2022

Software Engineer II

  • Led provider data-model design across engineering levels and built an event-driven ingestion pipeline that onboarded hundreds to thousands of acquired providers into search.
  • Built a pipeline that loaded warehouse-generated provider rankings into Elasticsearch for ranked results.
  • Built a delayed workflow that converted unclicked search impressions into provider leads after 60 minutes.
  • Automated daily advertising geo-target synchronization by joining campaign providers with postal-code data.

IrisVR

Oct 2018 – Mar 2021

Software Engineer I → II

  • Owned the data model and API for a generally available cloud filesystem that freed CAD projects from local machines for wireless VR workflows.
  • Designed performant descendant-change detection so deep file-tree updates propagated without repeatedly scanning the full hierarchy.
  • Shipped an issue-tracking system for architecture, engineering, and construction teams collaborating in VR.
  • Improved APIs through tracing, batching, and parallelization, and raised the company’s Web Vitals score from 50 to 90.

TeslaGov

Jun 2015 – Oct 2018

Software Engineer

  • Modernized a legacy Spring and Java monolith for deployment on AWS.
  • Built an authentication and profile microservice for the evolving cloud architecture.
  • Maintained product surfaces spanning Java, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, React, Redux, and Gradle.

Beyond code

Interests

Chess, tennis, CrossFit, skiing, and cool weather.