Kevin Nguyen

Senior Software Engineer at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Technology

Greater Seattle Area

About

I am trained in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a B.S. from the University of Washington and M.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. I started my career with Boeing, where I developed experience managing satellite and radio communication subsystems for the P-8 Poseidon Navy aircraft. While obtaining my Master’s degree, I expanded my skills to the development of a radar simulation application for the Navy. While I enjoyed my work in hardware systems, I sought to develop software engineering skills to stay relevant with the fast-moving pace of technology. Presently, I am a developer at the mobile app development company Metova. While this was a career change from my previous experiences, my technical background and problem solving skills helped me to quickly gain valuable experience and allowed me to become a veteran developer in less than three years. With Metova, I worked on a wide variety of products and platforms (iOS, Android, Web). Of these products, I am particularly proud of an application called “Avatalker”, which allows autistic and other non-verbal children to communicate. For each of my projects, I was able to efficiently communicate and collaborate with customers, designers, testers, and other developers to deliver products from conception to production. I strongly believe in continual learning, which is why I take the time to learn new programming languages and skills in addition to passing on knowledge through technical talks and mentoring of new employees. I deeply care about the work that I do and the people that I work with, and I have a passion for finding unique solutions to challenging problems.

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineer at Walt Disney Parks & Resorts Technology
    Aug 2015 - Present · 10 yrs 11 mos

    - Developed iOS mobile apps (Objective-C, Swift, SwiftUI) for Disney Theme Parks - Worked with international teams to integrate features (e.g. dine, commerce, resorts, fastpass) - Delivered features such as dine menus, banner notifications, permission requests, dashboard - Coordinated with design and dev teams to re-skin the apps to use standard tab navigation - Designed content-driven system to create new native campaign screens without an app release - Led team of engineers to improve performance, fix bugs, reduce crash rates, reduce launch times - Coordinated with Android dev teams to maintain consistent guest experience between platforms - Became subject matter expert for analytics reporting and accessibility (VoiceOver) - Led project to add additional languages to Hong Kong Disneyland - Improved quality with unit tests, UI tests, and documentation - Worked with dev ops team on CICD system to improve test automation and test app deployment - Continued training by attending WWDC and took work-sponsored training courses

  • Mobile Application Developer at Metova, Inc.
    Jun 2012 - Apr 2015 · 2 yrs 11 mos

    - Developed mobile apps for iOS (Objective-C & Swift), Android (Java), & Web (Ruby on Rails) - Collaborated with customers, designers, and QA from conception to product release - Provided technical support for customers & quickly resolved issues - Worked as sole developer for “Avatalker AAC” (http://avatalkeraac.com) - Worked on a variety of products: education, social networking, banking, medical, sales - Integrated multiple mobile technologies: Bluetooth, camera, audio, OCR, text-to-speech - Employed development best practices: issue tracking, unit testing, UI automation testing, continuous deployment, source control (Git), peer code reviews, documentation - Trained/mentored new employees & gave presentations on technical topics

  • Controls Engineer (Contractor) at Bridgestone
    Nov 2011 - May 2012 · 7 mos

    - Designed, integrated, & tested a control box for an ultrasonic cutting system - Supported maintenance for laser engraving and vision automation systems

  • Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia Tech Research Institute
    Aug 2010 - Aug 2011 · 1 yr 1 mo

    - Supported the development of a MIMO radar benchmark application (MATLAB) - Presented research at conferences for the Office of Naval Research

  • The Boeing Company (Greater Seattle Area)
    • Communications Engineer
      Sep 2008 - Jul 2010 · 1 yr 11 mos

      - Managed equipment for satellite & V/UHF communication subsystems - Conducted integration testing for communication hardware in classified labs - Resolved technical problems with communication hardware in labs & on aircraft - Coordinated with software teams, suppliers, & customers

    • Systems Engineer
      Jul 2007 - Sep 2008 · 1 yr 3 mos

      - Facilitated risk & aircraft weight improvement with engineers, suppliers, & customers - Managed the risk database & programmed VBA tools to enhance reporting capabilities