Tengis Bat-Ulzii

Engineering Manager & SRE Lead

San Jose, California, US

Summary

Engineering leader with 8 + years building cloud‑native payment and marketplace platforms at global scale. Proven record of cutting cloud spend by $1.2 M / yr, delivering zero‑downtime MySQL migrations, and tripling developer release velocity while hardening K8s reliability to 99.99 %.

Cloud & Platforms, Databases, Observability & SRE, Programming

Experience

Engineering Manager, SRE

Apr 2024Present
Mercari USPalo Alto, CA
1 yr 2 mos
  • Managed a cross‑geo SRE team of 4 engineers across US & JP time‑zones
  • Led FinOps program: rightsized Cloud SQL shards, migrated CDN/WAF to Cloudflare, and removed idle AWS resources, cutting > $30 K / mo and avoiding $1.2 M / yr spend
  • Implemented data‑footprint reduction program (‑50 % on 25 TB main shard) to accelerate backups and lower storage costs
  • Executed zero‑downtime primary switch‑over to Rocky Linux MySQL and enabled writeset replication, unlocking MySQL 8 rollout
  • Instituted SLO‑driven on‑call; reduced flaky alerts by 40 % and cut MTTR by 20 %
  • Introduced 50 / 30 / 20 ownership matrix and facilitated weekly SRE‑EM cadences, boosting accountability and delivery

Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Jan 2022Mar 2024
Mercari USPalo Alto, CA
2 yrs 2 mos
  • Operated 100+ node GKE clusters powering 200+ microservices, and upgraded Istio service mesh and two 200-node clusters with zero downtime via automated canary rollout scripts.
  • Rolled out Mimir + Loki stack, reducing MTTR from 45 min to 12 min.
  • Developed and delivered MySQL shard archival tooling and schema-change automation.
  • Reduced GKE compute spend by 18% QoQ through workload right-sizing and maximizing Committed-Use Discounts.
  • Authored 35+ internal guides on cost optimization and reliability, boosting cross-team knowledge sharing and onboarding speed.

Software Engineer, Merpay Payment Platform

Jan 2020Dec 2021
Mercari JapanTokyo, Japan
1 yr 11 mos
  • Owned the payment microservice core state-machine, enabling all value exchanges across the Mercari group.
  • Led platform reliability and security initiatives, including chaos engineering and compliance, measurably improving service robustness.
  • Delivered peer-to-peer money transfer from design to production and migrated a high-traffic API partner with zero downtime.
  • Spearheaded Pub/Sub proxy migration across four services, cutting cross-org request latency by 35% and eliminating a bespoke broker.
  • Designed and shipped a transaction-management SDK (Saga/TCC patterns) adopted by 10+ payment microservices, and implemented a gRPC tracing interceptor that reduced client-visible Spanner errors by 80%.

Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2019Dec 2019
TaskworldTokyo, Japan
10 mos
  • Designed and shipped greenfield microservices in Go for Taskworld 2.0.
  • Prototyped an Elasticsearch + Cassandra stack to replace MongoDB, improving scalability and search capabilities.
  • Collaborated with backend, frontend, and design teams to rapidly iterate on new user workflows.

Software Engineering Team Lead

Aug 2018Jan 2019
TaskworldBangkok, Thailand
5 mos
  • Managed a cross-functional team of 4 engineers across Bangkok and Tokyo, driving collaboration and delivery.
  • Owned the Go-based payment subsystem supporting global subscriptions.
  • Delivered full-stack features using React, Node.js, TypeScript, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Redis, and Kubernetes.

Software Engineer

Sep 2017Jul 2018
TaskworldBangkok Metropolitan Area, Thailand
10 mos
  • Built Go payment micro‑service powering subscription and billing flows
  • Created Taskworld's first public REST API with developer documentation and examples
  • Maintained on‑premise enterprise deployment and optimized backend performance via micro‑tuning

Software Engineer

Aug 2016Jul 2017
Solomon Strategic ConsultingSeoul, South Korea
11 mos
  • Delivered an anticorruption law iOS app for Yulchon, a leading Korean law firm, enhancing legal compliance and accessibility for clients.
  • Created a reusable Android WebView container, streamlining mobile app development and ensuring consistent user experience across numerous production apps.
  • Led the redesign and modernization of eyulchon.com, improving site usability and visual appeal for a professional audience.
  • Developed an NLP server and React-Redux chatbot (Python, NLTK, KoNLPy, spaCy, Flask), enabling automated client interactions and seamless integration with legacy ASP.NET systems.

Education

Yonsei University

Mar 2015Feb 2017

Finance Master's degree

1 yr 11 mos

Chonnam National University

Mar 2014Feb 2015

Korean Language Program Language Program

11 mos

Economics Bachelor's degree

3 yrs 9 mos

Languages

  • EnglishNative or Bilingual
  • MongolianNative or Bilingual
  • GermanLimited Working
  • KoreanLimited Working
  • JapaneseElementary

Certifications

Skills

Cloud & Platforms

GCP, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Istio, Cloudflare

Databases

MySQL, Spanner, MongoDB

Observability & SRE

Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, SLOs, Incident Response, FinOps

Programming

Go, TypeScript, React

Honors & Awards

  • KGSP 2014 (Korean Government Scholarship Program)
  • Dean's List – Spring 2016