Kai Yao
Senior Software Engineer (Fullstack) at Epsilon
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKai Yao is a Senior Fullstack Software Engineer in Chicago with 11 years of experience building product-focused web systems that bridge engineering and business strategy. He excels in TypeScript-led stacks and has been adopting Rust, bringing pragmatic language choices to performance-sensitive components. Kai has driven end-to-end features at startups and enterprises—architecting real-time multiplayer systems, inventory ingestion pipelines, and multi-phase payments—while cutting costs by replacing third‑party tooling with self-hosted solutions. He routinely pairs backend service design with customer-facing UI work and has championed AI tooling adoption across organizations. Comfortable in fast-moving Series C environments as well as large enterprises, he focuses on shipping things people actually want to use. An uncommon strength is his blend of design-rooted thinking (visual design background) with deep engineering execution, helping turn complex product needs into usable, maintainable systems.
11 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Visual Design Graphic Design, Visual Design Graphic Design at The Starter LeagueBachelor of Science Biochemistry, Bachelor of Science Biochemistry at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Chinese
Github Skills (99)
actix-web10
web-development10
async10
servicenow10
rust10
decimal10
editor9
interval-arithmetic9
cli9
pooling9
visual-studio9
microsoft9
loco9
visual-studio-code9
redux9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
lwec/lwechurch.com
Apr 2018 - Dec 2019
Temporary static site before we move to Wix.
Contributions:9 PRs, 102 pushes, 9 branches in 1 year 7 months
wixstatic-sitestatic-site-generator
kaibyao/rust-postgres-rest
Jan 2019 - Aug 2019
Exposing your PostgreSQL database as a REST API.
Contributions:111 commits, 14 PRs, 107 pushes in 7 months
apipostgresql-databasedatabasepostgresrest
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.