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Allen Tang
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Allen Tang

Software engineer - ex-Spotify, ex-Wayfair

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Followed by Jay S, Jay S, and John N

Malden, USA

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Malden, USA

During my time at Spotify (2020–2024), I built custom Backstage plugins across several engineering teams within Core Infra. My contributions include: - Reliability: Built a Service Level Platform to enable teams to define SLIs/SLOs, visualize time-series metrics against SLO targets using RechartsJS, and access executive-level summary stats across all services. - Observability: Designed and built the Heroic Migration UI, a tool created to track a company-wide metrics migration effort from our in-house time-series database (HeroicDB) to our Prometheus-based databases. - Storage: Supported a high-priority (P0) initiative by building the GCS Retention Backstage plugin. Partnered with backend storage engineers to design UI workflows that simplified Google Cloud Storage bucket labeling and tracked compliance across the company. - Fleetshift: Provided frontend consulting (architectural design, mob programming, implementation, and handoff) to build the UI for Fleetshift, an internal tool used for large-scale automated code changes. 
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During my five years at Wayfair (2015–2020), I spent my first two years building internal tools within Warehouse Management Systems. As the demands of our data workflows evolved, my work naturally led me to transition our legacy, cron-based pipelines into event-driven architecture. To overcome key limitations in the upstream open-source code, I researched, modified, and provisioned Wayfair’s earliest Kafka Connect clusters. To scale this impact, I founded a new Infrastructure team dedicated to supporting event-driven systems company-wide, serving as an internal consultant to help engineering teams migrate from database polling to real-time stream processing.
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My first full-time position out of college was at Cambridge Systematics, a transportation consulting company in Boston, from 2013 to 2015. While I was there, I supported development of NYC MTA’s Bus Time app, a real-time bus tracking app on web and mobile. It was a splendid way to kick off my software engineering career, gaining exposure to mapping libraries like LeafletJS and Mapbox. You can check out the app here: https://bustime.mta.info/ and the open source repo here: https://github.com/camsys/onebusaway-nyc
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Cover image for While at Cambridge Systematics from
While at Cambridge Systematics from 2013 to 2015, I provided software consultation and built out many features for NYC MTA’s Bus Time platform, helping build real-time GPS tracking infrastructure that delivers live locations and arrival estimates to millions of daily riders.
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