Brian Kung, AI Native Software Engineer
| (224) 730-6348 | Vernon Hills, Illinois, US | briankung.dev | LinkedIn
Member of Technical Staff @ PayPal, Inc
2025 — Present
Maintained and improved core backend vaulting infrastructure that handles millions of transactions per day
  • Drove Claude Code adoption across the org — added it to the remote development environment, innersourced harness improvements, and founded an internal AI community
  • Top code reviewer on a team of 12, handling 26% of all team reviews (~89,000 LOC in the past year) at half the team's median turnaround, while shipping ~9,000 LOC of my own
  • Helped migrate the vault's backbone service out of the monolith, instrumenting it with Datadog and standing up JaCoCo/SonarQube coverage reporting
  • Contributed innersource fixes across the org, including a custom RuboCop cop for a monolith-wide refactor
Senior Backend Software Engineer @ Kagi
2025
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 - senior software engineer at IoT connectivity provider (2022)
  • LiveWatch - software engineer at home security provider (2017-2018)
  • Project Credo - cofounder at science consensus platform (2014-2017)
Languages
Rust, Java, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, Crystal
AI / Agentic
Agentic Development, Claude Code, LLM Tooling
Infrastructure
AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Datadog, CI/CD, OpenAPI
Practices
Test-Driven Development, Code Review, Distributed Systems, Observability, Playwright
EDUCATION
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2007 — 2011
Bachelor - East Asian Languages and Culture