Ho Chi Minh City Viet Nam

Tiêu Anh Quốc

Backend engineer — the systems behind consumer products, and the AI running inside them

Profile

Five years building and leading backend systems for consumer products in C# and ASP.NET Core — spanning membership platforms, event ticketing, product traceability, and multi-market applications. Before that, two years at Viettel Digital, working on the internal platform that ran and measured ViettelPay promotions.

As language models became reliable enough for production, I moved toward building with them rather than waiting for the dust to settle. I now build and operate two Vietnamese-language assistants in production: retrieval over the company’s own documents (RAG), roughly a hundred tools, exposed through MCP, that let the larger one act on live systems, and models we host ourselves rather than rent from a provider.

The lesson that work keeps teaching is the one demos skip — an LLM feature is worth only as much as the evaluation harness holding it in place.

I am now pushing in two directions: building AI systems that are engineered and evaluated rather than prompted into working, and going deeper into architecture and infrastructure — how services are divided, how they are deployed, and how they behave when the load arrives.

Appointments

2021 — present

Estuary Solutions — Software Engineer, now Tech Lead

Backend lead on each of the projects below.

  • Vietnamese-language AI assistants — two now live in production, sole engineer on the core AI runtime and the backend behind them. The larger one answers from the company’s own documents through RAG over a vector store and acts on live systems through roughly a hundred tools served over MCP; the second is retrieval-only. Intent classification routes each turn and narrows the tool set offered to the model, since describing the whole catalogue costs more than twice its context window; a sixty-case end-to-end regression suite gates every change
  • Both run on models hosted in-house rather than a vendor API — I chose and deployed the language model, the embedding model and the reranker, and tuned the serving stack around them
  • In-app messaging and social features — real-time delivery over SignalR, scaled across instances with a Redis backplane; messaging, media and the social graph each kept in their own store behind one service
  • Event ticketing and on-site check-in — registration, ticket issue and check-in at the gate, built into the member app. The largest event it has carried sold more than twelve thousand tickets
  • Member engagement and loyalty platforms — services split by responsibility, with a dozen background workers behind them
  • Product traceability — unique-identifier and QR generation, industrial label printing, warehouse scanning tools, and the lookup that takes a single code and returns where that item came from and everywhere it has been since
  • Virtual running events — one multi-country app serving participants across several Southeast Asian markets

ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Kafka, Docker, Python for the AI work

2019 — 2021

Viettel Digital — .NET Developer

  • Led the internal platform that ran ViettelPay promotions end to end, and wrote it solo — configuring a campaign, putting it live, and measuring afterwards what it actually returned against the targets set for it, with the numbers pulled back in from Google Analytics and AppsFlyer
  • Supplied the API details and answers partner teams needed to integrate with ViettelPay

ASP.NET MVC, SQL Server

2019

Tín Việt Soft — Intern

  • Web Forms development — the first code I wrote that someone else had to run

ASP.NET Web Forms

Open source

2026

DockZ

Docker and Linux virtual machines on Apple Silicon — a native alternative to Docker Desktop. Runs a real dockerd and k3s machines from a five-megabyte app, with no Homebrew and no daemon of its own.

Swift, Apple Virtualization framework — Apache 2.0, source

2026

CleanShot Z

Menu-bar screenshot tool for macOS: capture, annotate, OCR and organise, entirely on-device. Written in Swift with no third-party dependencies.

Swift, ScreenCaptureKit, Vision — Apache 2.0

2026

VS Sharp

A C# development environment rebuilt on VSCodium — Rider-style tooling with no proprietary components anywhere in the stack.

TypeScript, VSCodium — MIT

2026

RedDash

Desktop app for tracking and logging time against Redmine issues, so a day’s entries take a keystroke rather than a browser tab.

TypeScript — MIT

2025

FileBlobEmulator

Azure Blob Storage emulator that writes blobs straight to the file system rather than into a database — a faster stand-in for Azurite in local development and tests. Speaks the Azure Blob API, including SharedKey authentication. Published on Docker Hub.

C#, ASP.NET Core — Apache 2.0

since 2022

NuGet libraries

Seven small libraries pulled out of production ASP.NET Core work and published for reuse — uniform API responses, file logging, health checks, a queue service, service registration and object mapping. Eleven packages, over 32,000 downloads.

C#, ASP.NET Core — source

Competences

Languages

C#, Python (AI services)

Frameworks

ASP.NET Core, .NET, Entity Framework Core

AI systems

Retrieval-augmented generation with reranking, tool-calling agents over MCP, self-hosted model serving, evaluation harnesses

Data

PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Redis, vector stores

Interfaces

REST APIs, real-time over SignalR, MCP servers, third-party integration

Infrastructure

Docker, Kafka, S3 object storage, background workers, containerised deployment

Education

2020

FPT Polytechnic

  • Business Information Technology