Building robust, scalable, and secure infrastructure

Steven Leung

DevOps Engineer & Mentor

I'm a software engineer and DevOps specialist at Turnitin.

I am a Jack of All Trades and Master of Many.

Resume

About Me

I have expertise managing on-premise infrastructure along with AWS cloud technologies including Kubernetes and Serverless.

I’m all about clean readable code with clear documentation because I work in a team and not as a lone ranger. I’ll mansplain the systems I design and police consistent coding standards. It’s not just about getting the job done, but getting it done right.

I believe in automations because I believe in human error. Everything ought to be codified and versioned. Testing is mandatory.

Here are a few technologies I've been working with recently
  • EKS
  • Lambda
  • Terraform
  • Vault
  • Ansible
  • Puppet
  • Python

Experience

Principal DevOps Engineer - Turnitin Infrastructure
Mar 2018 - present

I am currently one of the lead engineers working to modernize and secure our legacy tech stacks in multiple domains.

I’m a champion of safe and controlled canary rollouts and blue/green deployments wherever applicable. I’m an expert at change management with no downtimes.

  • Retrofitted legacy systems with TLS encryption in transit
  • Implemented and safely executed canary rollout of in-place OS upgrade, and third-party library updates
  • Completely captured VM provisioning in IaC, integrated with F5 BIG-IP LTM node pool management
  • Automated and simplified maintenance downtimes for our core product, eliminating much human error
Senior DevOps Engineer
Oct 2017 - Mar 2018

I transitioned to the newly commissioned DevOps team to modernize legacy infrastructure by containerizing and utilizing Kubernetes for orchestration

  • Refactored and migrated platform provisioning to Puppet
  • Integrated blue/green deployment into build and release process
  • Continued to improve release process by enabling a CI/CD pipeline for core product
Senior Site Operations Engineer - Turnitin Engineering
Jul 2010 - Mar 2018

I designed and implemented build and release process for our core product, rescuing the backlog of stuck releases and restoring productivity to the development teams.

I transformed what used to be multiple day and multiple personnel release process, to a single push-button deployment controlled by QA team, completed within an hour.

  • Managed upgrading third-party software and enabled operating system upgrades
  • Streamlined backend code, increasing efficiency for scalability
  • Offloaded session store into Memcache to enable load balancing without sticky sessions
Site Operations Engineer
Jan 2008 - Jul 2010

While the company still felt like a startup, I took on a technical support role, collaborating with the customer service team to address customer problems.

I coded as a full-stack engineer to support the new features we were building in our core product, working on backend and frontend web development.

  • Mastered Perl 5
  • Rebuilt software platform, upgrading major versions of Apache and Perl
  • Migrated web cluster to CentOS 6 Linux

Education

2003 - 2007
Bachelor of Science, Mehanical Engineering
University of California, Berkeley

Relevant Coursework

  • Data Structures
  • Algorithms
High School
Sierra Vista High School
GPA: 4.3 out of 5.0

Extracurricular Activities

  • Varsity Water Polo and Swim Team Captain
  • Key Club President
  • National Honors Society

Get in Touch

My inbox is always open. Whether you have a question or just want to say hi, I’ll try my best to get back to you!
Mail me