Thaw Tran

THAW TRAN

Engineer by trade. Founder by choice. (Father by love.)

hi@thaw.devn00bvnthaw-devthaw_tran

About Me

I'm a passionate software engineer with over 15 years of experience building scalable applications and monitoring production systems. My journey spans from co-founding and scaling a SaaS platform that served 10k+ clients to working with industry leaders like Uber on global car-sharing platforms.

Currently, I'm exploring the frontiers of AI, LLMs, and Agents as a SoloFounder at Pando and Lily, LLC, where I've built real-world AI applications.

I've open-sourced CanvasMCPClient, and currently building in public VISONA.

Coding is my passion — I love the problem-solving aspect, the continuous learning, and the satisfaction of building something that makes a real impact. Whether it's optimizing database performance by 30%, managing zero-downtime deployments, or architecting new features from scratch, I approach every project with enthusiasm and attention to detail.

I dig root cause, and find solutions, make decision for the final one, explain the reason behind the decision, test and ship the solution, watch and monitor production, report and close the issue. So just tell me your issue and forget about it!

Technologies & Tools

AI Agents
Ruby on Rails
FastAPI
PostgreSQL
PgBouncer
Loki & Grafana
Sentry
DevOps
n8n
Flutter
Docker
AWS
MongoDB
Ruby AI
WebSocket
Python
MCP
Vector DB
AI Memory
Yjs
Hocuspocus

Experience

PANDO AND LILY, LLC

SoloFounder

Learnt a lot about AI, LLMs, Agents, and was trying to build a business as a solopreneur. I built and launched Paperboy News, Datumize AI, open-sourced CanvasMCPClient, and building in public VISONA.

01/2025 - Present

AILLMsPythonFastAPIRuby on RailsNginxPostgreSQLPgBouncerSolid QueueLokiGrafanaDockerSolid CableKubernetesMCPQdrantNeo4jmem0YjsHocuspocus

UBER CARSHARE

Remote senior full-stack engineer

Australian car-sharing application originally named Car Next Door. I joined the company before it was rebranded and integrated to Uber Carshare.
  • Part of Vanguards team, driving projects that increased car bookings
  • Contributed to the project which transform everything to new brand name
  • Joined a core team that refactor core services and integrate with Uber's ecosystem
  • Joined Marketplace squad that focus on rebuilding the whole pricing platform
  • Learnt how to design readable, stable & scaleable services

02/2022 - 07/2024

Ruby on RailsPostgreSQLFlutterStimulusSidekiqAWSSentryDatadog

DESIGNFILES

Remote senior full-stack engineer

SaaS application that helps designers creating moodboards, floorplans, 3D renderings, so their clients can easily visualize their space.
  • Developed advanced rendering techniques for 2D & 3D designs with pure Javascript & Canvas
  • Upgraded and migrated the database from MySQL & ElasticSearch to PostgreSQL
  • Led and managed a lot of core features
  • Reviewed other developers' PRs

09/2020 - 04/2022

Ruby on RailsPostgreSQLJavaScriptCSSMySQLDocker

BOOST

Co-Founder & CTO

Digital marketing SaaS that I built and managed from scratch. We sold it to a US company.
  • Served 10k+ clients
  • Managed zero-downtime deployment across 6 load-balanced servers and 3 MongoDB instances
  • Created white-label feature by building a separate NodeJS microservice providing native SSL certificates

01/2018 - 05/2021

MeteorJavaScriptjQueryMongoDBNodeJS

GLOLENT

Remote part-time backend Ruby engineer

Portal for remote freelance developers, working as a back-end Ruby on Rails developer.
  • Built scraping tool with RoR, Selenium, Capybara, to collect jobs and developers information

06/2019 - 02/2020

Ruby on RailsGraphQLPostgreSQLReactJS

MINERVA

Remote full-stack Ruby on Rails engineer

Japanese advertising management application with new marketing technologies like Tag management, Data management, CookieSync, Cross-device marketing solutions.
  • Handled data with BigQuery
  • Configured Kubernetes for monitoring and deployment

01/2018 - 05/2019

Ruby on RailsGoogle CloudBigQueryKubernetesMySQL

COORDISNAP

Back-end Ruby on Rails engineer

Social networking for fashion lovers with 3.5+ million mobile downloads and 1+ million active users monthly.
  • Maintained API by benchmarking codes, refactoring and re-indexing database, increasing service performance by 30%
  • Improved unit tests and released new API version
  • Experienced pair programming and code reviewing

04/2016 - 01/2018

Ruby on RailsRSpecMySQLMemcacheElasticsearchAWS