Overview

Experienced and impactful engineering leader, blogger and speaker. I am motivated and enthusiastic by new challenges in business, product & technology. My latest adventure is in Payment industry to make Vietnam a cashless country with ZaloPay.

Here are quick things about me & my work:

1. Initially I worked in the Security industry. I published various researches. The very first Google Chrome's vulnerability is reported by me.

2. Later I also had a chance to lead a team to build https://reputa.vn/, a social listening product. It was a great time to work with the brightest minds in Distributed Systems & Machine Learning. I founded Vietnam Data Scientists, a Facebook community with 20k+ members as in 2022.

3. I've helped ZaloPay to create a scalable ledger. In the near future, we aim for 30k tps. It's really a big challenge.

4. I love open engineering culture. I've contributed to various open-source projects, e.g.: Apache Avro, Redis, Quarkus. At ZaloPay, I've initiated & led programs for Open Source (https://github.com/zalopay-oss) and Engineering Blog (https://engineering.zalopay.vn/). Sharing is caring. The programs are ways to nurture & attract more talents.

5. I love growing people. I designed courses & trained freshers.

6. I'm shifting my mindset to be product-oriented. Marty Cagan is my favorite product guru. I'm interested in using Wardley Mapping in developing strategies.

Education

MSc with distinction, Computer Engineering

2011 - 2013
Hanoi University of Technology

BSc with distinction, Computer Engineering

2005 - 2010
Hanoi University of Technology

Student, Gifted Math

2003 - 2005
Lam Son High School for the Gifted

Experiences

Engineering Manager

2022 to present
ZaloPay (VNG)
  • Led Accounting domain to achieve 30k tps

Principal Software Engineer

2017 to 2022
ZaloPay (VNG)
  • Focusing on building distributed systems, I've designed and provided solutions for Payment Core services in ZaloPay

  • Mastermind behind ZaloPay Edu, a comprehensive training program for engineering freshers

  • I created public channels to make ZaloPay open, including: open source repositories on GitHub, engineering blog on Medium

Senior Software Engineer

2017
Zalo (VNG)
  • Worked to improve CDN infrastructure

Senior Data Engineer

2014 to 2017
Viettel Group
  • Led a team to build a massive-scale social listening product using open source components including: crawlers (written in Java & Scala), messaging (using ActiveMQ & Protobuf), analytics (using Spark, Python Scikit-learn) and storage (with HBase, Redis, ElasticSearch, MySQL)

  • Optimized performance for Python microservice using ZeroMQ & Greenlet (Apache Thrift does NOT suit my needs)

  • Researched on Statistics, NLP (Natural language processing). I worked under the mentorship of several PhDs. They helped me efficiently learn & improve my knowledge on AI.

Security & Data Engineer

2013-2014
Cyber Security Department, MV Corp
  • Conducted various researches on Big Data technologies (Hadoop stack), Machine Learning & Text Mining algorithms such as SVM, Neural Network, Ensemble method, TF-IDF … for detecting trends, related topics...

  • Led a project of building a large-scale crawler based on Nutch for collecting information from web and social networks

Manager

2010-2013
Bkav Security Division, Bkav Corp.
  • Used ANTLR to develop a language ,which is scriptable and based on context free grammar, to generate data for fuzzing.

  • Involved in many phases to design a product such as UI/UX, High-performance backends... I've got in-depth knowledge of systems and assisted technologies. Additionally, I'm very interested in designing business model for products.

  • Via forensics and investigation, I helped many people secure their computing systems & identities

  • Designed core content, prepared syllabus for intern students

Teaching assistant

2010-2012
Hanoi University of Technology
  • Gave lectures on Network programming & Security

Intern student

2006-2010
Bkav Security Division, Bkav Corp.
  • Researched extensively on Application Security, Reverse Engineering, Windows kernel system...

  • Discovered several critical vulnerabilities in popular applications. The very first vulnerability of Google Chrome was submitted by me

  • Presented my paper entitled "Unicode shellcode and improvements" at Bellua Cyber Security conference (2008). In the paper I demonstrated a novel idea on optimizing size of Unicode shellcodes.

Certificates

Foundation of Everyday leadership

2022
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (via Coursera)

Design-Led Strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship

2022
The University of Sydney (via Coursera)

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies,

2016
Princeton University (via Coursera)

Economics

2010
National Economics University

Business Management

2010
Ministry of Science & Technology

Best students in “Panasonic-sponsored class for embedded software development”

2009
Panasonic Vietnam

Speaker in “Bellua Cyber Security Asia, the 4th annual conference on Information Security and Hacking”

2008

Hobbies

Here are several things I do in my leisure time

  • Reading books about technologies & entrepreneurship.
  • Self-studying several topics I like such as Distributed System, Machine Learning, Blockchain ...
  • Contributing to various open source projects like: Redis, Apache Avro, Dapr, MQTT.js, Gensim, HapiJS
  • Managing several technology communities I founded such as "Vietnam Data Scientists" (since 2013), "Vietnam Blockchain Experts" (since 2016)
  • Blogging
  • Cooking
  • Jogging
  • Photographing

References

My digital traces in the online world

  1. ComputerWorld: Google issues first patches for Chrome
  2. F-Secure: Microchip MPLAB IDE Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
  3. Article: Building a Search Text Box Control with WPF
  4. Redis contributor
  5. Apache Avro contributor
  6. MQTT.js contributor
  7. Gensim contributor
  8. Introduction to Zookeeper (slideshare)
  9. Admin of Vietnam Data Scientists community
  10. Admin of Vietnam Blockchain Experts community
  11. ZaloPay Edu: Khởi nguồn (vietnamese)
  12. ZaloPay Open Source
  13. ZaloPay Engineering Blog