vhh's builds
About · Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Vinh Ho Hoang

Senior Software Engineer · Agentic AI, Platform & Infrastructure

I’m a software engineer in Ho Chi Minh City. I build systems and chase the kind of understanding that comes from breaking things and putting them back together.

I spend time on algorithmic problem-solving and system design — the kind of work where the hard part isn’t getting it to run, but making it run well. Outside of work, I help organize tech talks and meetups for the local developer community through Grokking Vietnam.

This blog is where I write about what I’m learning and building.

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Highlights

What I'm looking for

Senior roles where I own outcomes, not tickets.

Agentic AI / Forward Deployed Engineer

Embedding with customers to turn messy, ambiguous problems into shipped AI solutions — agents and RAG grounded in real workflows, with the product sense to know what is worth building.

Why me
  • Work directly with customers to diagnose and resolve product, backend and infrastructure issues.
  • Led a hackathon team to 1st place with an AI/RAG application for customer-support workflows.
  • Contributed SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA controls — the security bar enterprise customers deploy against.
  • Full-stack and infrastructure range to take a prototype all the way to production on my own.
Product mindsetCustomer-facing engineeringProblem discoveryLLM applicationsAgentic workflowsRapid prototypingEnd-to-end ownershipTechnical communicationEnterprise security

Senior Backend / Full-stack

Owning hard backend problems end to end — performance, correctness and scale — plus the product UI that sits on top.

Why me
  • Designed a distributed API rate limiter enforcing consistent limits across service instances.
  • Full-text search that lifted click-through 30% (top three results at 80%).
  • −40% request time on a critical service through horizontal scaling.
  • Low-latency, fault-tolerant ad-serving microservices and 100M+ records/hour ELT at Zalo.
Distributed systemsAPI designPerformance optimisation

Senior Platform / Infrastructure

Building and running the platform other engineers ship on — Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, security and compliance.

Why me
  • Introduced Kubernetes to the company and led adoption from research and architecture to production.
  • Led per-PR isolated staging environments on Kubernetes + Argo CD.
  • Operate production infrastructure for Holistics, dbdiagram and dbdocs with DevSecOps practices.
  • Full LGTM observability stack plus VictoriaMetrics / VictoriaLogs; SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA controls.
GitOpsDeveloper experienceReliability engineering
Hiring for one of these? Message me on LinkedIn [email protected]

Experience

Tap any skill to see where I used it.

20192020202120222023202420252026Full Stack Engineer at Holistics Data, Apr 2022 – PresentSoftware Engineer at Zalo · Adtima, Oct 2020 – Mar 2022Associate Software Engineer at Zalo · Adtima, Dec 2019 – Oct 2020Software Engineer at FUJINET Systems, Mar 2019 – Dec 2019Research & Development Intern at FUJINET Systems, Oct 2018 – Mar 2019Software Intern at FUJINET Systems, Jul 2018 – Sep 2018
Holistics Data · 4 yrs 7 mosZalo · Adtima · 2 yrs 4 mosFUJINET Systems · 1 yr 6 mos
  1. Holistics DataNow
    Full Stack EngineerApr 2022 – Present4 yrs 7 mosHo Chi Minh City

    AI analytics platform helping data teams deliver AI-assisted self-service BI

    Holistics is a cloud business intelligence platform for data integration, modeling, analysis, and visualization. The same team also builds dbdiagram and dbdocs, database design and documentation tools used by developers worldwide. ↗

    Founded
    2015
    Offices
    Singapore · US · Vietnam
    Team
    ~50–60 people
    Domain
    B2B SaaS · Business intelligence

    1. Full Stack Engineer

      Apr 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 7 mos
      Full-timeProducts: Holistics · dbdiagram · dbdocs

      I work across platform infrastructure, full-stack engineering, production operations, security compliance, and customer-facing technical problem-solving.

      What I did
      • Platform infrastructure
        • Design and operate the production infrastructure behind Holistics, dbdiagram, and dbdocs, applying DevSecOps practices to improve reliability, scalability, and security.
        • Introduced Kubernetes to the company and led its adoption from technical research and architecture planning through hands-on production implementation.
        • Led a team from problem definition through implementation of isolated staging environments for every pull request using Kubernetes and Argo CD.
        • Reduced request time by 40% by designing and implementing a horizontal-scaling strategy for a critical service.
      • Full-stack engineering
        • Designed and developed a distributed API rate limiter to protect internal web services and enforce consistent limits across service instances.
        • Implemented full-text search that improved search-result click-through rate by 30%, with the top three results reaching an 80% click-through rate.
      • Production operations & customers
        • Work directly with customers to diagnose and resolve product, backend, and infrastructure issues.
      • Security compliance
        • Contribute engineering and operational controls for SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance.
      • Hackathons
        • Led a hackathon team that built an AI/RAG application to improve customer-support workflows, winning first place in the Performance & Productivity category.
        • Built a PostgreSQL-compatible database engine for Excel, winning the hackathon's Best Technical Project award.
      Impact
      • 40% lower request time on a critical service through horizontal scaling.
      • +30% search click-through rate; top-three results at 80% CTR.
      • Brought Kubernetes into the company, from research to production.
      • Hackathon 1st place (Performance & Productivity) and Best Technical Project.
      Stack & skills
  2. Zalo · Adtima
    Associate Software Engineer → Software EngineerDec 2019 – Mar 20222 yrs 4 mosHo Chi Minh City

    Advertising platform of Vietnam's largest messaging ecosystem

    Zalo is Vietnam's dominant messaging super-app. Adtima is its advertising arm, selling and serving ads across the whole Zalo ecosystem — Zalo, BaoMoi, ZingNews, ZingMp3 and more. I worked on Adtima Core Server, the backend that decides which ad to serve and records what happened afterwards. ↗

    Reach
    ~60M monthly active users
    Properties
    Zalo · BaoMoi · ZingNews · ZingMp3
    Company
    ~600–700 people
    Domain
    Ad-tech · Real-time serving · Analytics

    1. Software Engineer

      Oct 2020 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr 6 mos
      Full-timeTeam: Adtima Core Server

      Adtima Core Server is responsible for efficiently distributing ads across the Zalo ecosystem and collecting the data metrics analysts and the business run on.

      What I did
      • Designed and programmed highly available, scalable, low-latency and fault-tolerant back-end microservices.
        • Ad-distribution services serving ads across Zalo, BaoMoi, ZingNews, ZingMp3 and the rest of the ecosystem.
        • Ad selection sits on the request path of consumer apps, so latency and availability were hard requirements, not nice-to-haves.
        • Services built to scale horizontally and tolerate failures without dropping ad delivery.
      • Designed, implemented and maintained ELT flows ingesting 100M+ records per hour.
        • Collected ad-event data — impressions, clicks and the other metrics — from across the ecosystem.
        • Extract-and-load first, transform in the analytics store, so raw events stay available for re-processing.
        • Fed the OLAP store that analysts and scheduled reports query.
      • Built RESTful APIs for internal usage and system management.
        • Internal APIs giving other teams access to ad data and metrics.
        • Management endpoints for operating and configuring the ad-serving system.
      • Produced and illustrated reports on charts to give insight about the business.
        • Turned raw ad metrics into chart-based reports for analysts and business stakeholders.
        • Scheduled (cron) report jobs — later optimised to run 40% faster.
      • Optimised code and data design for the analytics path.
        • Reworked OLAP data design and code to cut memory usage by 50%.
        • Sped up cron-job report processing by 40%.
      Impact
      • Reduced OLAP memory usage by 50% through code and data-design optimisation.
      • Made scheduled (cron) report processing 40% faster.
      • Promoted from Associate Software Engineer after 10 months.
      Stack & skills

    2. Associate Software Engineer

      Dec 2019 – Oct 2020 · 11 mos
      Full-timeTeam: Adtima Core Server
      What I did
      • Joined the Adtima Core Server team straight out of university.
        • Onboarded onto the ad-serving backend and its metrics pipeline.
        • Shipped features and fixes on production Java microservices.
      • Learned to operate services at ecosystem scale.
        • Worked on systems serving traffic from Zalo's consumer apps.
        • Laid the groundwork for the ELT and OLAP work that followed after promotion.
      Stack & skills
  3. FUJINET Systems
    Software Intern → Software EngineerJul 2018 – Dec 20191 yr 6 mosHo Chi Minh City

    Software house building for the Japanese market

    FUJINET Systems JSC is one of Vietnam's established offshore software companies serving Japanese clients. I joined as an intern, wrote my university thesis in its R&D group, and stayed on as a software engineer on a client project for Sony. ↗

    Founded
    2000
    Offices
    Vietnam · Japan
    Team
    ~80–90 people
    Domain
    Offshore development · Enterprise web

    1. Software Engineer

      Mar 2019 – Dec 2019 · 10 mos
      Full-time
      ProjectSony Digital Marketing MasterDigital marketing management platform built for Sony.
      What I did
      • Developed the controller layer between the UI and the service layer.
        • Validated data coming from the UI before it reached business logic.
        • Linked input/output data between the UI and service layers.
      • Wrote unit test cases to test the project's APIs.
        • Covered the API layer so changes could be verified before release.
      • Prepared technical documents and onboarded new developers.
        • Wrote technical documents for team members.
        • Helped new developers catch up with the codebase and the work.
      Stack & skills

    2. Research & Development Intern

      Oct 2018 – Mar 2019 · 6 mos
      InternshipTeam: R&D
      ProjectThesis: MicroservicesUniversity thesis — decomposing a legacy monolith into a sample microservices architecture.
      What I did
      • Researched microservices architecture, software architecture and system design.
        • Studied the key concepts: service boundaries, inter-service communication and independent deployment.
        • Grounded the research in broader software architecture and system design principles.
      • Broke a legacy system down into a sample microservices architecture.
        • Analysed the legacy system and split it along service boundaries.
        • Built the resulting sample microservices system as the thesis deliverable.
      Stack & skills

    3. Software Intern

      Jul 2018 – Sep 2018 · 3 mos
      InternshipTeam: Software Department 4
      What I did
      • Training project: customer-information web application.
        • Built a web app to manage customer information.
        • Implemented with Java Servlet and JSP.
      • Blockchain research.
        • Studied blockchain, Ethereum and smart contracts.
        • Built a simple real-estate renting web app backed by smart contracts and Node.js.
      Stack & skills

Skills

Languages & frameworks
Backend & data
Platform & infra
Observability
Security & compliance
AI
Craft

Education, certifications, courses and languages

Education

B.Sc. Software Engineering

VNUHCM — University of Science · 2015 – 2019

Graduated with Good classification · Thesis on microservices architecture

Certifications
  • Facebook DevC Vietnam Innovation Challenge — React Native track · 2019
  • IELTS 7.0 · 2019
Courses
  • AlgoExpert — System Design
  • BigO Blue — Intermediate Algorithms & Data Structures
  • BigO Orange — Advanced Algorithms & Data Structures
Languages
  • VietnameseNative
  • EnglishProfessional
  • ChineseLimited

Beyond the day job

Community

I help organize tech talks and meetups for the Ho Chi Minh City developer community through Grokking Vietnam.

Side projects

Small tools and games on the projects page, plus algorithm write-ups on GitHub.

Recently writtenAll writing →
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