~ $ whoami
Tanson Lee
Software engineer at Citadel in New York City.
## experience
- Building the compute and storage layer for research.
### internships
- Reliability platform that auto-generates E2E tests for revenue-critical ad events from production traces: 117 events and 9,761 tests protecting $100M+ in annual revenue.
- Config-driven pipeline that alerts on data corruption, ingesting 75TB/day, with optimizations that cut its storage by 99.5%.
- Monitoring and alerting for the core ad impressions service (170B+ daily events), reducing on-call load by 6 hours a week.
- Proposed and landed a retry mechanism in the ad impression cache for fault tolerance against upstream outages, projected to save $11.8M per half.
- Parallelized query plans for database clustering on 6.84% of tables: ~35% faster clustering and ~25% faster table scans.
- Reworked clustering file selection by consolidating clustering stages, cutting table scan costs ~30% for insert-heavy tables.
- Distributed caching microservice handling 30,000+ writes/sec for asset pricing, reducing pricing errors by 95%.
- Data-sharing system over gRPC that runs pricing calculations in parallel across servers, a 300% speedup.
- Worked on Biomes, a web-based, massively multiplayer voxel game.
- Extended the in-house physics engine with swimming, climbing, ladders, and ice.
- Realistic water reflections written as high-performance OpenGL shaders.
- Redesigned the NPC AI service around 3D Newtonian physics, adding fish and birds to the world.
- One of four engineers building credit-card checkout for NFTs.
- Re-architected authentication around role-based access control, used by 85%+ of customers.
- Auction system with Redis-cached chain reads (~2s → <100ms) and job queues for writes.
- Localization infrastructure and French support for European customers.
- Checkout features: subscriptions, gift cards, refunds, coupons, taxes, and receipts.
- Restructured data storage, cutting some page loads from 15s to under 500ms.
- Onboarded two full-time developers and owned code review and deployments.
## education
- Major GPA 3.98 / 4.0.
- Coursework in real-time programming, operating systems, networking, distributed systems, algorithms, and AI.