Brian Kung
Senior Software Engineer at PayPal
Vernon Hills, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrian Kung is a senior software engineer with 13 years of experience building reliable, scalable backend systems and shipping pragmatic engineering improvements across startups and enterprises. He’s driven migrations from monoliths to microservices on AWS, introduced fast parallel Playwright E2E suites, and optimized CI and release engineering to save thousands of minutes monthly. A practical polyglot, he’s implemented APIs in Rust, Python, Rails and backend fixes for notable open-source projects like Lobsters, where he improved Markdown rendering, tagging, and URL encoding. Brian combines hands-on coding with mentorship and operational rigor, aiming to be a force multiplier for teams rather than a lone “10x” coder. Based in Vernon Hills, IL, he brings a rare humanities background from UIUC that informs clear communication and product-focused engineering.
13 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree East Asian Languages Literatures and Linguistics, Bachelor's degree East Asian Languages Literatures and Linguistics at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (10)
markdown10
ruby-rails10
rails10
markdown-it10
ruby10
aggregator9
forum9
rspec9
utf8
postgresql8
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
lobsters/lobsters
Mar 2019 - Mar 2022
Computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 8 PRs, 28 comments in 3 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Brian primarily focused on fixing bugs and implementing features related to the backend logic of the Lobsters platform. They addressed issues by modifying the Markdown rendering process for story descriptions, ensuring images were correctly converted to links based on user roles. Furthermore, the user made updates to the tag creation logging, ensuring accurate tracking within the moderation system. They also enhanced the system by forcing UTF-8 encoding for fetching URLs for titles and implemented multi-tag pages and feeds.
discourseaggregationrailsweb-appforum
briankung/briankung.github.io
Jan 2017 - Jan 2024
Contributions:110 pushes, 2 branches in 7 years 1 month
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