Brian Kung, Senior Software Engineer
| (224) 730-6348 | Vernon Hills, Illinois, US | briankung.dev | LinkedIn
Technical leader seeking engineering cultures that prize growth and clarity.
Member of Technical Staff @ PayPal, Inc
2025 — Present
Maintained and improved core backend vaulting infrastructure that handles millions of transactions per day
  • Bootstrapped team's generative AI practices with demos, trainings, and documentation
  • Improved developer experience with "vibecoded" git hooks and custom browser extensions
  • Found and patched gaps in telemetry, logging
Senior Backend Software Engineer @ Kagi
2025 — Present
Implemented core features in Crystal, took on leadership responsibilities
  • Led development of opening search business beyond paid subscribers to all users
  • Interviewed team lead candidates for mobile development with Flutter
  • Implemented location-aware weather results, localization fixes, and various improvements
Senior Software Engineer @ Backpack Group
2022 — 2024
Designed and developed APIs using Rust, led improvements to software development lifecycle
  • Optimized CI builds by 26% for savings of over 5,469 minutes of CI time per month
  • Split existing REST API microservice into sub-microservices with no downtime
  • Wrote internal tooling that reduced release engineering process from hours to minutes
  • Enabled code generation and automation capabilities for frontend and QA teams using OpenAPI
Software Engineering Consultant @ briankung.dev
2012 — Present
Full-stack consulting for various clients across multiple industries
  • Hologram - IoT connectivity provider (2022)
  • Improved reliability, scalability, and performance by migrating PHP billing monolith to microservices on AWS
  • Led evaluation and selection of Playwright test suite which went on to run 100+ parallel E2E tests in under 1 minute
  • LiveWatch - Home security provider (2017-2018)
  • Implemented Docusign contract signing workflow using responsive design
  • Migrated checkout workflow to API driven SPA with VueJS and Vuex
  • Project Credo - cofounder at science consensus platform (2014-2017)
  • Lead prototyping in a full-stack capacity, building out the backend API in Rails as well as the frontend in VueJS
  • Solicited and hosted user experience interviews for prototype web application
Key Skills
Rust, Ruby, Making Computer Go Brrrr, Test-Driven Development, Web Development
EDUCATION
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2007 — 2011
Bachelor - East Asian Languages and Culture