Mar 2020 – Mar 2021 · 1 yr · London, England, United Kingdom

• Furnace lets you build data-driven applications 10x faster and save up to 90% on what you'd spend on similar platforms such as Segment. And most importantly, you can see exactly how much you'd spend on each part of your data pipeline so there are no surprises!

Feb 2020 – Present · 6 yrs 1 mo

• A weekly podcast where I speak with other engineers who are working with serverless technology in the wild and get their stories from the trenches.

Jul 2019 – Present · 6 yrs 8 mos

• Heads up Lumigo's consulting business line and work as a developer advocate.

Jun 2018 – Jun 2019 · 1 yr

• Lumigo is the best troubleshooting tool for serverless applications. With one-click distributed tracing, Lumigo lets developers effortlessly find & fix issues in their serverless environments.

Oct 2018 – Present · 7 yrs 5 mos · Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

• Join 14,000+ engineers who are improving their AWS and serverless skills every Monday.

Jul 2018 – Present · 7 yrs 8 mos

• The AWS Hero program recognizes a vibrant, worldwide group of AWS experts whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact within the community. Heroes go above and beyond to share knowledge via social media, blog posts, open source projects, events, and user groups.

Jun 2018 – Present · 7 yrs 9 mos · London, United Kingdom

• I help SMEs turn product ideas into reality through experienced hands-on consulting.
• My services include:
• Consult with CTOs on strategic direction.
• Architecture reviews.
• Best practices for CI/CD, security, performance and scalability.
• AWS cost optimization.
• Upskill teams through custom training.
• Build systems based on customer's specifications.
• Check out my consulting services: https://theburningmonk.com/hire-me.
• Testimonials:
• "Yan's time was easily the best investment I've made in tech." - Iman Fadaei
• "Yan was a key factor for the success of the launch of our app." - Karam Fattal
• "Yan's profound expertise in Amazon Web Services (AWS) was nothing short of a game-changer for our infrastructure and team practices" - Karam Debly
• "Yan is one of the rare people who can speak the language of business and of devs" - David Wilts
• "If you want to learn Serverless and AWS, you can not find a better person than Yan" - Bala Chalasani
• "Yan is one of the finest engineers I have ever worked with. His contributions were critical to the success of this project." - Glynn Fouche

Apr 2018 – Jun 2019 · 1 yr 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• DAZN is a world leader in sports streaming, with millions of subscribers worldwide and up to a million concurrent viewers for sporting events. DAZN is one of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK, with over 250 technical staff across London, Amsterdam, Leeds and Katowice, and growing fast.
• DAZN runs a modern tech stack, with React and micro-frontend on the UI and all backend services are hosted in AWS while making extensive use of container and serverless technologies.
• As a principal engineer I have made a telling impact on the company on a number of fronts.
• I took lead on business critical projects to make sure they’re delivered on time and with quality.
• I consult and work with different teams to provide technical guidance and mentorship.
• I mentor and train teams on AWS and serverless, and help them adopt best practices and avoid costly mistakes.
• I provide a bridge between different teams and disciplines to help improve communication across the organization.
• I work with the architecture and SRE teams to define our usage of AWS.
• I created the backend guild as a forum for teams to share ideas and discuss their concerns.
• I work with the heads of development and recruitment team to improve our recruitment process.
• I defined our candidate assessment process to improve consistency and alignment with our needs.
• I interviewed over 100 candidates and trained others to join our interview process.
• I represented the DAZN engineering team and spoke at over 70 conferences worldwide, including AWS re:invent.
• I raised DAZN’s profile in the developer community, which further helped our recruitment process.
• I found opportunities for others to start their journey into public speaking and mentored them on writing abstracts, content and delivery.
• I contributed to DAZN’s engineering blog and encouraged and mentored others to do the same.
• I encouraged and mentored others to contribute towards open source projects.

Nov 2017 – Feb 2022 · 4 yrs 3 mos

• Author of Production-Ready Serverless: Operational Best Practices.
• Co-author of Serverless Architecture on AWS, Second Edition.
• Co-author of F# Deep Dives.

Jul 2017 – Jul 2019 · 2 yrs

• Instructor of live training video course "Designing Serverless Architecture with AWS Lambda"

Jan 2017 – Mar 2018 · 1 yr 2 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Responsible for building the backend services for a new real time multiplayer mobile game. This includes a new networking stack that will power the next wave of multiplayer games at Space Ape Games.
• Here are key facts about this new networking stack:
• It's globally deployed to minimise network latency between player and server.
• It's implemented with Scala, Akka and Netty.
• It's highly performant and scalable. It outperformed the commercial product Photon during our Alpha tests in Netherlands and Philippines.
• It supports both TCP and a proprietary reliable-UDP protocol.
• It runs on EC2's c5 instance class to leverage the new virtualization stack to minimise network jitter.
• It uses a proprietary network protocol that is optimised towards bandwidth usage. This makes it viable in countries with poor bandwidth, such as China.
• It uses buffer pools that are allocated to unmanaged memory to reduce GC pressure.
• It supports failure and latency injection. This makes it easier for us to test the resilience of the client.
• Outside of the game team, I worked closely with the Server Tech Director to modernise our tech stack and improve our development practices:
• educate and encourage the server team towards a service-oriented architecture to improve reusability and make it faster to build new games
• educate and mentor the server team on AWS services such as Kinesis and Lambda
• work with the DevOps team to improve CI/CD pipeline and reduce deployment time
• I also represent the company externally by:
• speaking at Space Ape-hosted events as well as external events such as user groups and conferences
• contributing to our tech blog

Apr 2016 – Nov 2016 · 7 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Worked as hands-on architect in the server team at Yubl. My role was to provide technical leadership and vision for server technologies, mentor and guide the team to make effective use of AWS services and represent the server team both within and outside the company.
• I worked closely with the CTO and product team to ensure we deliver a better experience to our users, faster. Upon joining in April, I identified the characteristics we desire from our architecture and lead the design, implementation and migration to an event-driven, service-oriented architecture built upon serverless (Amazon Lambda and the Serverless framework for Nodejs) and realtime streaming (Kinesis) technologies.
• The many components inside this architecture are loosely coupled through realtime messages and made use of many AWS services, including API Gateway, Kinesis, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, IOT, CloudSearch and ElastiCache, with Lambda functions the centrepiece that glues everything together.
• To improve our analytics capabilities, I also lead the design and implementation of a new analytics pipeline that will stream realtime Kinesis events into Google BigQuery.
• To improve the most visible parts of the Yubl app - search, who to follow, your personal feed and the explore feed - I lead the design and implementation of a set of replacement services to improve scalability and maintainability, whilst also deliver more search capabilities and relevant recommendations to our users by leveraging SAAS offerings such as Amazon CloudSearch and GrapheneDB.
• As our architecture expanded and became more complex, I identified growing pains and challenges and worked with various team members to provide solutions for:
• centralised logging for Lambda functions
• centralised configuration
• distributed tracing with correlation IDs for Lambda functions
• auto-scaling AWS resources that do not scale dynamically, ie Kinesis, DynamoDB
• automated process of cleaning up old Lambda function deployments

Nov 2015 – Mar 2016 · 4 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Worked in the Partner Product Development (PPD) area to improve performance and stability of BoxHandler, a critical backend system that supports the POS devices in 95% of JUST EAT restaurants.
• Also gave numerous brownbags around F# and helped found the "F# |> Bristol" user group.

Nov 2011 – Present · 14 yrs 4 mos

• I have spoken internationally at over 200 tech conferences worldwide, including large industry events such as AWS re:Invent and QCon.

Jan 2010 – Oct 2015 · 5 yrs 9 mos · London, United Kingdom

• I was involved with all aspects of our server-side solutions, and played a lead role in designing and building the backend services for most of our games as well as building up a platform to help us meet our scalability and big data challenges.
• Key Achievements
• ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
• Designed, architected and implemented the backend for our social slots game with ~1M daily unique users and 250 million requests per day
• Improved productivity by an order of magnitude by adopting F# to implement a new slots engine
• Successfully championed the use of F#, mentored and helped others get up to speed with F# and functional programming
• Improved the deployment process by adopting FAKE for build automation
• Simplified dependency management by adopting Paket
• Improved readability and maintainability of codebase by adopting Aspect-Oriented Programming
• Semi-automated the game balancing process for our MMORPG title "Here Be Monsters"​ by instigating the use of Neo4j to model the game economy
• Improved performance of flagship title "JackpotJoy Slots"​ by 100% with a number of changes including use of Protocol Buffer
• Improved performance by 500%, reduced average latency by 60% and operational cost by 90% for MMORPG title "Here Be Monsters" by introducing a stateful server architecture with F# agents
• Improved logging infrastructure by instigating the use of ElasticSearch and Kibana
• Instigated the use of NoSQL databases such as Redis, CouchBase, DynamoDB and Neo4j
• Instigated the use of Erlang for a push notification service
• Instigated the move towards microservices architecture whilst defining strategies for automated deployment, managing IO, logging, etc.
• Designed and architected a real-time analytics system using Amazon Kinesis
• Designed, implemented, and open sourced a number of library for working with various AWS services such as Kinesis, CloudWatch, DynamoDB, S3, SWF

Jul 2006 – Jan 2010 · 3 yrs 6 mos

• I was involved in the analysis, design, development, testing and support of a number of applications developed and supported in-house by the PrimeSwap team.
• In my last role, my main responsibility was the continued development and support of the T0 Reconciliation application which is responsible for providing intra-day reconciliation between swap and hedge (e.g. cash equities) for both equity and FX.
• Key Achievements
• ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
• Transformed T0 through a series of performance optimization and process re-engineering, it now handles 10X the volume in under 10% of the previous time.
• Expanded T0's coverage to include the APAC and US regions.
• Doubled the number of business cases T0 is able to reconcile by implementing additional matching algorithms.
• Gained valuable experience of working closely with the trading desk as well as external clients through working on a client facing application used to automate validation and allocation of client orders
• Contributed towards the stability of the production environment by providing 1st/2nd line support on a number of different applications.