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Available for new rolesHanoi

Hi, I'm

TrịnhVăn Thắng

Backend & DevOps engineer. I design, scale and run the distributed systems behind on-chain trading platforms, real-time analytics and e-commerce.

Hanoi, Vietnam.

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About

Trịnh Văn Thắng standing in a city square with skyscrapers behind

I'm a backend and DevOps engineer working on the systems behind on-chain trading at XBIT: a real-time analytics and trading platform and a perpetual futures exchange. I write services in Go and Node.js, run them on Kubernetes across Hetzner, AWS and Azure, and stay on call for both the code and the infrastructure it runs on.

The part of the job I like most is taking a system that is starting to hurt, finding where the time and money actually go, and removing that. That has meant scaling a platform fifty times over without buying fifty times the hardware, cutting a cloud bill by more than half, and keeping trading systems up while releases roll through them.

Before XBIT I built e-commerce and enterprise platforms at Forlife, and GameFi and NFT backends at Lucis Network. I studied computer science at Hanoi University of Science and Technology.

What I've run in production

Numbers from systems I built and operated, not benchmarks. Each row is a load test, a bill, or a traffic report I was on the hook for.

  1. 50K

    Concurrent users at 600 ms p90

    Took XBIT GMGN from 1K users at 1 s p90 to 50K at 600 ms. Fifty times the load, 40% lower latency, by removing database access bottlenecks, reworking the concurrency model and tuning IOPS and network alongside infrastructure scaling.

  2. 100K

    Messages a second through the on-chain pipeline

    Real-time ingestion and enrichment on NATS that indexes, analyzes and enriches blockchain data across Ethereum, Solana and Base. Long-running work moved onto Redis-backed asynq queues so API latency stays predictable under bursty on-chain activity.

  3. −60%

    Cloud spend across Hetzner, AWS and Azure

    Profiled real resource consumption and cut service footprints by half, then moved non-production environments off AWS and Azure onto Hetzner bare metal. Managed services stayed only where they earned their cost.

  4. 10M

    Monthly visits on a 5M-user storefront

    Backend APIs for TokyoLife's e-commerce platform on Node.js and NestJS with MySQL and MongoDB, Elasticsearch search over the catalog, and order processing over RabbitMQ and Kafka.

  5. 2 of 14

    Engineers owning all platform infrastructure

    One of two people running the infrastructure for two products and a fourteen-engineer backend team: self-managed K3s on bare metal next to managed EKS, every environment from Terraform and Ansible, GitOps delivery with ArgoCD and canary rollouts into live trading systems.

Experience

Four companies, each one a step further into the infrastructure. Open an entry for the detail.

  1. Jul 2024 – now

    Two products: GMGN, a real-time on-chain analytics and trading platform for discovering early tokens and tracking smart money across Ethereum, Solana and Base. Perp, a perpetual futures DEX in the Hyperliquid category with on-chain leveraged trading.

    Backend

    • Scaled the platform from 1K CCU at 1 s p90 to 50K CCU at 600 ms p90 through load testing and removing bottlenecks in database access, the concurrency model and hot-path data structures.
    • Built the on-chain ingestion and enrichment pipeline on NATS, up to 100K messages a second.
    • Built the perpetual-futures backend: order and position lifecycle, margin and funding-rate settlement, liquidations, low-latency market data.
    • Designed OLTP layers on PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ScyllaDB and TiDB, OLAP pipelines on ClickHouse, and OpenSearch for token and entity search.
    • Reviewed code and set the refactoring, testing and engineering standards for the backend team.

    DevOps and cloud

    • Designed and operated multi-cloud infrastructure across Hetzner, AWS and Azure, cutting spend by 60%.
    • Self-managed K3s on bare metal alongside managed clusters, all provisioned from Terraform/OpenTofu and Ansible, packaged with Helm and Kustomize.
    • Delivery end to end: GitLab CI and GitHub Actions into ArgoCD GitOps, Argo Rollouts for canary and blue-green releases with zero downtime.
    • Platform layer: Traefik/NGINX ingress, cert-manager, Cilium, External Secrets Operator with Azure Key Vault, EMQX/MQTT.
    • Monitoring, dashboards and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana.
  2. Jan 2023 – Jun 2024

    Backend for TokyoLife, an e-commerce storefront with over 5M users and 10M monthly visits, plus the internal platforms behind the company's digital transformation.

    • Built and operated the storefront APIs on Node.js/NestJS with MySQL as the transactional store and MongoDB alongside, designed for high availability and fault tolerance.
    • Storefront search on Elasticsearch, indexing the product catalog for fast, relevance-ranked queries.
    • Order and transaction processing over RabbitMQ and Kafka, and the same brokers for real-time third-party sync.
    • Internal platforms for storage, transport, KPI and invoicing on a microservices backend.
    • Test-driven development and refactoring for maintainability.
  3. Jan 2022 – Jan 2023

    GameFi and NFT products: a launchpad, an esports tournament platform and an EVM-wide NFT indexer.

    • Lucis Launchpad: backend and smart contracts behind NFT sale registration and allocation.
    • Lucis Arena: tournament services and data model with blockchain reward and funding flows next to traditional payments.
    • Lucis OpenSea: crawler and indexing microservices with NestJS and gRPC covering NFT data across EVM chains.
  4. Jul 2021 – Dec 2021

    Government software systems.

    • Contributed to database and system design for eGov products and built UI components for the web client.

Education and honors

Where I studied, and the one result from before it that I still like to mention.

2017 – 2022

Hanoi University of Science and Technology

Computer Science, with a grade point average of 3.4 out of 4.

2017

Provincial valedictorian

Highest score in the province in that year's national university entrance exam.

Stack

What I reach for, grouped by where it sits in the system.

Languages and frameworks
GoGinTypeScriptNode.jsNestJSReactNext.js
Storage
PostgreSQLMySQLMongoDBScyllaDBTiDBClickHouseElasticsearchOpenSearchRedis
Messaging
NATSApache KafkaRabbitMQEMQX / MQTTasynq
Cloud and Kubernetes
AWSAzureHetznerK3sEKSAKSDockerHelmKustomizeTraefikNGINX Ingresscert-managerCilium
Infrastructure as code and delivery
Terraform / OpenTofuAnsibleGitLab CIGitHub ActionsArgoCDArgo RolloutsExternal Secrets OperatorAzure Key Vault
Observability
PrometheusGrafana

Let's talk

Open to backend, platform and DevOps roles, and to conversations about scaling systems. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

Email me LinkedIn