Hai Duong

I’m currently part of the Platform Engineering team, supporting all verticals of Scale. I specialize in usage-based billing systems, where Scale bills B2B customers for data services. A particularly interesting challenge is keeping up with complex pricing models while safely evolving the invoicing and revenue recognition logic. It’s also essential to ensure that all the data produced is reliable, substantiated, and audit-friendly to meet financial audit requirements.

At Hopper, I helped build and maintain end-to-end pipelines that sourced data from various verticals and ingested it into the subledger for reconciliation and FP&A. The challenge was that Hopper’s verticals were growing rapidly, making it both tricky and exciting to keep up with changes in monetization use cases. Scaling the reconciliation process across a large number of vendors, payment processors, and banks was also a puzzle that kept things dynamic and engaging.

I was assigned to Amazon’s organization responsible for accounting and finance automation, and fortunately, things just clicked for me. Throughout my time at Amazon, I enjoyed working on various problem domains in this area. First, I worked on scaling Amazon’s accounting subledger to massive scale by migrating away from RDBMS to AWS technologies with zero downtime. Next, I focused on enabling adhoc financial reporting at scale, utilizing columnar data formats. This was particularly refreshing and innovative since it was still common to maintain ETL processes to stage data into OLAP databases for analytics. I was also instrumental in launching Amazon’s first bank reconciliation platform to help reconcile thousands of bank accounts globally. Lastly, I contributed to stabilizing the invoicing and billing platform. My time at Amazon led me to develop an interest in scaling distributed systems to meet the stringent requirements of handling massive financial data and SOX controls to ensure consistency and compliance.

My earlier passion was network engineering so this internship was a dream opportunity. Valero generously offered me a year-long internship, during which I worked with network devices like routers and switches, deploying them to offices and refineries. I also wrote scripts to streamline and facilitate the relevant tasks.

As an international student studying abroad in America, I couldn’t have asked for a better education. Trinity’s close-knit community made me feel welcome every moment I was there. Professors knew me by name and everyone supported me as I adapted to a new culture. My proudest achievement was receiving the top senior award for Computer Science students.

I was part of the second cohort of this revolutionary program, which enables students to study remotely while working full-time. I took multiple courses across various Computer Science paradigms to broaden my understanding of different problem domains. I challenged myself to complete the program in just 5 semesters, taking 11 courses all while working full-time at Amazon. I finally did travel to Atlanta for the graduation ceremony, where I finally met the professors whose voices I had only heard through pre-recorded lectures.

I took a year-long break before joining this program. I was part of the first cohort and focused on courses in statistics and machine learning. During the program, I worked as a TA, and upon graduation, I was retained as an Instructional Associate to continue supporting professors.

I’m currently a Vietnamese teacher here, where I teach K-12 Vietnamese-American students who are eager to preserve their heritage. Learning Vietnamese plays an important role in that process. In addition to teaching, I assist with organizing major school events. I also built and maintain the web app for online registration, allowing parents to enroll their children and pay fees online. This has been a significant step in automating the digitalization of student records while streamlining the payment process. Previously, the school exclusively relied on paper forms and cash/check payments.

Through the program, I assisted teachers with varying degrees of experience in Computer Science in teaching their high school students. Over the course of 3 years with TEALS, I helped at Wahluke High School (Mattawa, WA), Bishop Blanchet High School and Ballard High School (Seattle, WA).