John Nguyen
Senior Software Engineer
Senior software engineer with 15 years of experience in release engineering and platform engineering. I build the CI/CD infrastructure, release tooling, and developer platforms that let engineering orgs ship reliably at scale. I'm driven by work that makes others more productive: removing friction and toil from dev workflows and freeing teams to focus on what they do best.
Skills
Core
- Release Engineering
- CI/CD
- Platform Engineering
- Developer Experience
- Infrastructure as Code
- Change Control
- AI Agents
Tools & Technologies
- Buildkite
- Terraform
- AWS
- Docker
- Datadog
- GitHub Actions
- Python
- JavaScript
- Git
- Shell Scripting
Work Experience (6)
May 2024 - May 2026
Release Engineer - Validated Release
Benchling
Owned the quarterly release process across 100+ customer tenants. These are life sciences companies requiring scheduled, change-controlled releases rather than continuous deployment.
- Transformed the quarterly validated release from a high-effort manual operation (two engineers dedicating 3-4 full weeks, often involving crunch time) into an automated process that one engineer can handle at half capacity in ~1-1.5 weeks. This was a ~90% reduction in engineering effort.
- Enforced change control in a regulation-adjacent environment, triaging engineer requests for compliance with customer validation agreements and collaborating with the validation team on corrective actions to prevent recurring breaches.
- Lowered the knowledge floor for operations that previously required deep domain knowledge. This was achieved through documentation, automation, and process refinement, which enabled new team members to meaningfully contribute from day one rather than requiring months of shadowing.
- Built agentic skills to automate the multi-step upgrade workflow, which previously a checklist executed by release engineer manually (triggering and coordinating pipelines, creating pull requests, posting Slack messages, updating metadata across disparate systems, etc.). Enabled a single engineer to manage 5x the concurrent workload, with the reduction in cognitive load and manual coordination.
Sep 2020 - May 2024
Release Engineer - CI/CD
Benchling
Same release engineering team as validated release, this period focused on building the CI/CD for releases at Benchling.
- Instrumented DORA metrics across the release pipeline, establishing visibility into deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate for the first time at Benchling.
- Established CI/CD SLOs where none previously existed. Stabilized merge times from unpredictable 2-3 hour p90 down to a consistent 30 minutes. Increased daily deployment frequency from ~1-2 to 4-7 releases.
- Led migration of merge queue tool (Bors to Aviator MergeQueue), reducing reliance on self-hosted tooling in favor of a vendor-supported solution.
- Hardened package publishing workflows as a security measure, ensuring all published packages originated from code reviewed, main branch code rather than local developer machines.
- Streamlined the release process by removing manual user touch points, reducing operational friction, lowering notification noise, and enabling faster cycle times.
Jan 2019 - Aug 2020
Software Engineer - Local Services
Yelp
Full stack development on the Local Services team, building features for business owners in the home and local services space.
- Shipped the after-hours responsiveness calculation for "Request a Quote", redesigning a long-standing business user painpoint. Rolled out with A/B experimentation and success analysis.
- Served as tech lead on a team composed of junior engineers, leading design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions across multiple concurrent projects.
- Ran a code review workshop for ~50 engineers across the division, covering best practices for writing reviewable PRs and conducting thorough, constructive reviews.
May 2016 - Jan 2019
Software Engineer - Engineering Effectiveness
Yelp
Platform engineering and infrastructure for a 700-engineer org across 1,300+ services with deploy-on-merge continuous deployment.
- Designed and built EE Metrics (an in-house DORA-equivalent), giving engineering leadership visibility into CI health, test flakiness, dependency staleness, and deployment frequency. Architected as an extensible instrumentation framework so teams could define their own audits without modifying the core system. Still actively used and written about at Yelp today.
- Scaled self-hosted Git infrastructure to handle growing CI load: implemented a tiered master-replica fan-out architecture for read scaling, high availability, and right-sized instance costs. Migrated off a single physical server to AWS. Implemented failover runbook, which was successfully employed in a live incident.
Sep 2013 - Apr 2016
Team Lead & Software Developer
National Oilwell Varco
- Led a 3-person software development team building oil rig monitoring systems, setting up a formal engineering culture of design reviews, 1:1s, and knowledge-sharing practices that reduced code churn and improved team velocity.
Sep 2011 - May 2013
Software Development Engineer
Microsoft
Designed and implemented ETL data warehouse pipelines for Windows App Store and Windows Update business intelligence, processing 100-500 GB daily across 1-5 TB database systems.
Projects (3)
EE Metrics (Yelp)
- Python
- Metrics
- Developer Productivity
- Platform Engineering
Developer velocity metrics platform I designed and built at Yelp in 2017. Still in active use and built upon, as documented in this 2024 Yelp engineering blog post.
pytest-antilru
- Python
- pytest
- Open Source
Python package for disabling LRU cache during pytest runs. Published and maintained on PyPI.
Open Source (GitHub)
- Python
- Open Source
Side projects and open source contributions.
Education (1)
- 2011
BSc, Co-op Program with Distinction
Computer Engineering
University of Alberta