Nick Yan (嚴耿武)

Shenzhen & Guangzhou, China | nickyim.us@gmail.com | WeChat: nickyim

Professional Summary

Senior Software Engineer with extensive experience developing ad-tech solutions and high-traffic distributed systems at Tencent. I specialize in bridging the gap between complex business objectives and scalable technical execution. Proven track record in rapid technology adoption, system security hardening, and leveraging metrics/observability to ensure system stability. Passionate about system optimization and cost reductions through architectural refinement.

Work Experience

Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.

Senior Software Engineer

1. Advertising Lead Management Platform | Nov 2025 – Present

1.1 System Takeover, Maintenance & Security

  • Orchestrated the seamless takeover and maintenance of a complex ecosystem comprising 39 microservices across Java 8 and PHP, facilitating lead capture, marketing components, and multi-channel messaging.
  • Security Hardening: Resolved a critical Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerability by switching to a centralized token-validation service, utilizing feature flags for a zero-downtime rollout.
  • Observability & Reliability: Standardized W3C TraceID propagation across the distributed architecture to accelerate cross-service debugging. Built comprehensive dashboards mapping subsystems to key business phases to proactively alert operators to messaging anomalies.

1.2 Privacy Call Masking & Audio Processing Pipeline

  • Spearheaded the architecture and full-lifecycle delivery of an asynchronous audio processing pipeline bridging telecom provider webhooks with external Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) services.
  • Successfully refactored a massive legacy calling ecosystem after one-month takeover, ensuring strict backward compatibility using feature flags as safety nets.
  • Optimized provider API interactions by proposing the consolidation of redundant callback webhooks, streamlining lead enrichment and message queue dispatching.

1.3 WeChat Contact & Lead Linking Service

  • Designed and developed a cross-system attribution solution to link WeChat Work "fan-add" events with Lead System records, overcoming strict WeChat privacy isolation policies.
  • Built the chain-linking-service and leads-wxwork-fan modules from scratch utilizing a Kafka-driven event consumer, customized Base62 time-based UUIDs for low-collision ID mapping, and scheduled tasks for record matching.
  • Established full CI/CD pipelines including multi-stage Docker builds, automated unittesting, service discovery, and dynamic environment configuration injection.

2. Advertising Material Management Platform | Dec 2024 - Nov 2025

Video Transcoding Cost Reduction Initiative

  • Engineered a system-wide optimization to defer video transcoding until ad-delivery, resulting in an annual cost savings of 3.8 million RMB (a 19% reduction in total 20 million).
  • Resolved significant legacy technical debt by decoupling the upload process from the transcoding service. Transitioned the system to a MySQL binlog-driven event architecture.
  • Implemented intelligent, dynamic routing to ensure immediate transcoding for high-priority, contract ads(e.g., government and time-sensitive ads) by introducing upload-source-based whitelisting.

3. Advertising Delivery Platform | May 2019 - Nov 2024

3.1 Smart Delivery Service

Enabled the advertisers to express their goals and materials at a higher project level. The service automatically delivers Ads according to those goals and selects materials based on statistics.

My key contributions

  • As co-architect and core developer, I designed how the ad projects relate to the underlying advertisements.
  • Built the entire process from the project data retrieval to storage.
  • Merged the statuses of the underlying advertisements into the project.

3.2 Earlier Contributions in Tencent

  • Integrated OpenTelemetry into the monolithic ad delivery platform .
  • Adopted the core concept Promoted Object and its service in Golang.
  • Core developer of Ad Target, an ad component restricts the audience an ad can reach.

Earlier Career Highlights (2006 – 2019)

Technical Lead | Shenzhen Baida Technology Co., Ltd. | Jun 2016 – May 2019

  • Architected and implemented a complete Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform from the ground up, enabling seamless, scalable on-premise deployments for the company's enterprise customer assistant product.
  • Resolved critical system performance bottlenecks and drove the adoption of Python microservices(Flask) and comprehensive system observability metrics.

Technical Lead | Shenzhen Bunker Interactive Entertainment Co., Ltd. | Apr 2014 - Mar 2016

  • Served as the sole Technical Lead, directing a cross-functional engineering team comprised of Android, iOS, Frontend, and Backend developers.
  • Established foundational system architectures and managed end-to-end Linux server administration.

Software Engineer / Senior Backend Developer | Tencent (Shenzhen) | Apr 2007 – Mar 2014

  • QQ Farm (QQ農場) (2009–2012): Played a pivotal role in the backend development and scaling of QQ Farm, one of China's most popular social games with peak Daily Active Users (DAU) in the tens of millions and over 20,000 requests per second. Engineered highly concurrent backend systems to support massive read/write volumes, optimizing database queries and implementing multi-layer caching (Memcached / Tencent Table Cache) to handle extreme traffic spikes. Resolved critical performance bottlenecks to ensure sub-second latency during peak-hour concurrent server events (e.g., mass "visiting" and "stealing" actions).

  • Early Tencent Work: Initially developed full-stack web applications (HTML/JavaScript) before transitioning fully to core backend systems (PHP, C++), heavily focusing on large-scale MySQL database design.

Software Engineer | Shenzhen Qianxunwang Technology | Apr 2006 – Mar 2007

  • Began career developing backend applications, building foundational expertise in PHP development and object-oriented design patterns.

Technical Skills

Category Skills
Programming Languages Golang, Java, PHP, Python, C++
Databases & Storage MySQL, Redis, MongoDB
Architecture & Messaging Microservices, Event-Driven Design
DevOps & Infrastructure Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD Pipelines, Linux (Debian/Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo)
Observability Metrics, Tracing, Logging, Alerting
AI & LLM Integration AI-Assisted Development(Rules, Skills, MCP), LLM & Neural Network Fundamentals
Version Control Git Workflows

Education & Certifications

Guangdong University of Technology (廣東工業大學) Bachelor of Software Engineering (軟體工程) | Graduated: 2006

Software Designer Certificate (軟體設計師資格證書) | Obtained: 2005

Languages

  • Chinese: Native (Mandarin, Teochew; Simplified and Traditional)
  • English: Working Proficiency (IELTS Band 7)