Tai VONG
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Available for selected consulting, contract & fractional work

Tai VONG

Backend & Platform Engineer · Technical Lead

I help product teams diagnose difficult backend failures, stabilize Go services, and turn fragile systems into observable, production-ready platforms.

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  • Go & gRPC
  • Distributed systems
  • Production reliability
  • Technical leadership

SYSTEM ONLINE 10.7769°N 106.7009°E Ho Chi Minh City

Selected work

Open source, writing, and production case work

Open source · flagship

grpcx

A production-ready Go framework for building gRPC + REST services — server lifecycle, structured errors, i18n, auth, and observability wired in from the start, so new services ship with reliability built in instead of bolted on later.

  • Go
  • gRPC
  • Observability
View repository

Writing & research proof

Anonymized case · business-critical workflow

The same business rule produced different results across system outputs

Problem
A configuration-dependent rule was correct in one path but disappeared from other generated outputs.
Approach
Traced the rule through calculation, persistence, preview, and export; defined the shared invariant and added cross-output regression coverage.
Outcome
Aligned every output around one verified rule and made the failure class testable.

Research · computer vision

Maintaining face trajectories through fragmented detections

Problem
Occlusion and missed detections fragmented identities in multi-face tracking.
Approach
Combined detection-tracking with tracklet association in a semi-online framework.
Outcome
Published a peer-reviewed system that runs at real-time speed with a short decision delay.

Case study · gRPC platform tooling

Ad hoc gRPC boilerplate repeated across every new service

Problem
Every new service reimplemented server lifecycle, error handling, and observability from scratch.
Approach
Extracted the shared pieces into grpcx, an open-source library.
Outcome
New services start with reliability primitives already in place.

Ways to work together

From a five-day diagnostic to ongoing technical direction

Start here

Backend Reliability Diagnostic

Focused 5-day investigation

A focused five-day investigation into a backend system that's failing in ways nobody can quite explain. You get a failure map, prioritized findings, a concrete remediation plan, and a handoff your team can execute without me.

  • Failure map of the system
  • Prioritized findings, ranked by risk and effort
  • Concrete remediation plan
  • Handoff walkthrough with your engineers
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Go & gRPC Production Hardening

2–4 week sprint

Takes a Go or gRPC service from "it mostly works" to production-hardened — correctness, observability, failure handling, and operability.

  • Correctness & edge-case coverage
  • Observability wired in — metrics, tracing, logs
  • Failure handling & graceful degradation
  • Operability handoff docs & runbooks

Fractional Technical Lead

Part-time, ongoing

Part-time technical direction for teams that need senior judgment without a full-time hire.

  • Architecture & technical decisions
  • Delivery systems & engineering process
  • Mentoring & team growth

Also available for selected contract engagements, technical advisory, speaking & workshops, and expert calls — reach out with what you're working on.

How I work

The same loop, every time

  1. 01

    Observe

    Read the signal before touching code — logs, traces, metrics, and the shape of the failure.

  2. 02

    Reproduce

    Recreate the failure on demand. If it can't be reproduced, it can't be trusted as fixed.

  3. 03

    Find the invariant

    Identify the assumption the system is silently violating.

  4. 04

    Fix the system

    Fix the invariant, not just the symptom, so the failure class doesn't come back.

  5. 05

    Verify in production

    Confirm the fix holds under real traffic, not just in a test environment.

Writing & open source

Notes on Go, gRPC, and distributed systems

Medium

Implementing common Go HTTP middleware

Middleware as a wrapper that runs before and after the main handler, keeping business logic free of cross-cutting concerns.

Read the article

Medium

Using buf.build to generate your gRPC codes

A tour through migrating an old protobuf/gRPC codegen pipeline to buf, based on hands-on research and practice.

Read the article

Research paper

A high-performance multi-face tracking system

Detection-tracking and tracklet association in a semi-online framework designed to run at real-time speed.

Read the paper
More on GitHub

About

Tai VONG

Technical Manager at Gearment, leading engineering across product and platform domains — architecture, delivery, and the teams that ship both.

My background is hands-on: backend and platform engineering, Go and gRPC, distributed systems, and the operational work of keeping production systems observable and reliable.

Earlier research background in AI and computer vision occasionally shows up in how I approach problems, though it isn't the focus of my work today.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Have a backend problem worth a second opinion?

Tell me what's failing and what you've already tried. I'll reply with whether I think I can help.

chitai.vct@gmail.com Connect on LinkedIn