Tin La
Backend software engineer building distributed systems that stay up — and recover on their own when they don’t.
About
I’m a backend software engineer based in Houston, Texas — most recently at Samsung Semiconductor in San Jose, where I worked on the Storage Management Service for a distributed storage platform. My work centered on the features that keep clusters alive: automatic emergency shutdown as node failures approach quorum loss, automated recovery and data rebalancing, and non-disruptive rolling updates.
Before Samsung, I modernized customer APIs at Cox Automotive — moving a monorepo backend to microservices on AWS — and I started my career at Epic, rebuilding a native home-health scheduling application as a web app. I care about fault tolerance, calm on-call rotations, and systems that recover on their own. Off the clock, I’m training toward a half marathon.
Experience
San Jose, CA
Backend Software Engineer — Storage Management Service
Samsung Semiconductor
- Owned the emergency shutdown feature that stabilizes the storage system during node failures near quorum threshold; primary on-call contact for shutdown incidents.
- Converted a customer-flagged data-loss risk into a testable solution within six months, designing a shutdown flow coordinated across three teams.
- Prevented 8×16 cluster data loss with automatic emergency shutdown across internal microservices and expanded real-time node health monitoring.
- Automated emergency cluster recovery — detecting and re-adding returning nodes, rebalancing data, and restoring cluster health.
- Eliminated a startup bottleneck by letting incomplete drive recoveries resume after startup, validated with 93 days of I/O uptime under resilience testing.
- Owned Non-Disruptive Update (NDU): a zero-downtime workflow cycling nodes offline, updating, and reintegrating them — 326 days of continuous uptime for a partner customer.
- Wrote privilege-based authorization checks across resource-sensitive REST APIs, and cut engineer onboarding time 50% with a rebuilt Confluence guide.
Austin, TX
Software Engineer — Customer API Platform
Cox Automotive
- Contributed to app modernization: converted a monorepo backend to a microservice architecture and migrated backend schemas to new DynamoDB tables.
- Automated test data provisioning and cleanup; increased unit test coverage by 40%.
- Streamlined the provider-facing upload experience by implementing auth protocols and reusable Terraform to provision LaunchDarkly feature flags.
- Expanded service observability with New Relic monitors, an app StatusPage, and PagerDuty.
- Created a secret generation workflow that eliminated manual effort and cut generation time by 50%.
Madison, WI
Software Developer — Home Health and Hospice
Epic
- Modernized the home health scheduling native application into a web app using C# and TypeScript.
- Maintained a patient-records desktop application used by medical professionals.
- Reduced physician signoff time by ~15 minutes per form by redesigning medication order forms from onsite user feedback.
- Wrote auto-save functionality that prevented patient bereavement setting loss.
Projects
Emergency Shutdown & Cluster Recovery
Automatic shutdown that stabilizes the storage system as node failures near quorum threshold, plus automated recovery that detects returning nodes, rebalances data, and restores cluster health.
Skills
Education
The University of Texas at Austin
B.S. Computer Science · 2015 — 2019 · Austin, TX