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 the team, handling 26% of all team reviews at half the team's median turnaround
  • 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 - 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
AI, Agentic Development, Rust, Ruby, Java, Test-Driven Development
EDUCATION
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2007 — 2011
Bachelor - East Asian Languages and Culture