Le Tran Minh Dat

Lê Trần Minh Đạt · cicca

AI-NATIVE SOFTWARE ENGINEER

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · Remote-ready (GMT+7, async-first)[email protected]GitHubLinkedIn

SUMMARY

I'm Dat, cicca on the internet. I love the moment an AI stops being a demo and starts doing real work, and I'll take it from an empty repo all the way to production. I like tinkering with new things, lately robotics and virtual assistants, and I polish them until they're done. Off the clock, I look after kittens. Where I'm headed: a real studio with Zillexa, research I'm proud of, open-source tools people use, and a voice in AI engineering.

EXPERIENCE

AI Gateway Platform Engineer

Aug 2026 – Present

Enterprise banking client · Outsourced contract

2-engineer team: I built the extension layer and own delivery and planning; the lead engineer reviews and merges.

  • Extended the bank's open-source LiteLLM gateway with a separate package and admin pages, so upstream releases still merge: a tamper-evident audit log (append-only, hash-chained), Vietnamese PII guardrails with a false-positive review flow, SSO and an auditor role.
  • Built Bedrock cost reconciliation that checks gateway spend against invocation logs and the AWS bill (Athena) every day, by account, team, user and model, with Bedrock tax shown separately; checking it against the real invoice exposed and fixed a 4x over-count.
  • Added cross-account access through assumed roles, budget-aware model downgrade, alerts by email, SES and SNS, bulk onboarding from a spreadsheet, X-Ray-linked traces and Terraform for the AWS stack; wrote the architecture docs and runbooks for the handover.

Backend & AI Engineer

May 2026 – Present

F&B and AI-commerce company · Contract

Two products: Siz, an AI commerce gateway (MCP), and Bảo Bối, a voice ordering assistant.

  • Siz (Aug 2026 – Present, two-person product team; I built the gateway and its web app): an MCP server that lets AI assistants search and book cinema and flight tickets on real merchant sites, then hands payment back to the user's own banking app.
  • Siz: accounts are linked with OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, every call to a merchant is signed (Ed25519, RFC 9421), and VietQR codes are verified before a user sees them; an AI-Ready scorer grades merchant sites on how well agents can use them. Go and PostgreSQL backend, Next.js web app, shipped to k3s through a GitOps pipeline with ArgoCD.
  • Bảo Bối (May 2026 – Present): a cat-mascot assistant that suggests drinks by mood and takes the order by chat or voice (LiveKit), pushes it to the café's POS and returns a VietQR to pay. Version 1 ran in the café, with a loop that turns bad replies into scenarios staff can approve and a watchdog added after a silent LiveKit outage.
  • Bảo Bối version 2 rebuilds it for many shops: a Go core, per-shop isolation with PostgreSQL row-level security, and a Python LiveKit agent.

Co-founder

2024 – Present

Zillexa · Independent dev studio

Independent dev studio of five members.

  • Co-founded a studio of five engineers that takes on product and AI builds together and competes in hackathons as a team.

AI Agent Consultant Engineer

Apr 2026 – Sep 2026

Hướng Nghiệp Á Âu · Freelance

Sole developer; handed over.

  • Built a 24/7 admissions chatbot and an advisor cockpit on a live CRM for a 19-branch academy. After each customer message a background job drafts three replies and a lead summary for advisors, who accepted 97% of the drafts.
  • Kept the bot from inventing courses or prices: the CRM is the only source for pricing and schedules, a course allow-list and topic pinning keep follow-ups on track, and hybrid RAG mixes pgvector with Vietnamese full-text search behind a provider-agnostic LLM layer.
  • Added image reading through a self-hosted VLM with SSRF protection; runs on-prem behind nine end-to-end test suites.

Core Full-stack Developer

2025 – Sep 2026

Enterprise accounting SaaS · 3-engineer team

Top contributor in a 3-engineer team; handed over.

  • Multi-company accounting platform built to Circular 99/2025 and used daily by 20 accountants; built consolidated financial reporting under Circular 202 end to end, with intercompany elimination and Excel export, plus fixed assets, loans and bank reconciliation.
  • Made posting safe with atomic batch posting and period locking, and set up CI/CD from GitHub Actions to GHCR with Watchtower on the client's servers.

AI Team Lead, Computer Vision

Jun 2025 – Jan 2026

Whammy Tech · Contract

Led 4 engineers (backend, frontend, mobile) and did all the AI work.

  • Fall and seizure detection on live RTSP camera streams with YOLO pose estimation and LLM-written incident reports, running on-site on two real cameras.
  • Added a rule that needs five frames in a row before alerting, which cut false alarms by 84% across 4,000 test cases.

Team Lead, Software Engineer

Oct 2025

NEURADAO · Contract

Led 3 engineers.

  • Led three engineers from an empty repository to a live AI trading platform in 20 days; wrote the trading logic, AI chatbot and automation backend (TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL) and deployed on AWS.

IT Support Technician

Jan 2022 – Dec 2024

FPT University IT · Part-time

Supported IT operations across academic and administrative departments while studying.

SELECTED PROJECTS

  • Siz — AI Commerce Gateway (MCP) · AGENTS THAT BOOK & HAND OFF PAYMENT

    An MCP server that lets AI assistants search and book cinema and flight tickets on real merchant sites, then hands payment back to the user's own banking app. Accounts link with OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, every merchant call is signed (Ed25519, RFC 9421) and VietQR codes are verified before a user sees them; an AI-Ready scorer grades how well agents can use a merchant site. Two-person product team since Aug 2026: I built the gateway and its web app.

    MCP · Go · OAuth 2.1 · PostgreSQL · Next.js · k3s

  • AI Gateway for an Enterprise Bank · SPEND MATCHED TO THE REAL AWS BILL

    The bank runs open-source LiteLLM as one AI gateway for its internal teams. I extended it with a separate package and admin pages, without changing the LiteLLM core, so upstream releases still merge: a tamper-evident audit log, Vietnamese PII guardrails, SSO and an auditor role, budget-aware routing, alerts and bulk onboarding. I also built Bedrock cost reconciliation against invocation logs and the AWS bill (Athena) by team, user and model, with Bedrock tax shown separately; checking it against the real invoice exposed and fixed a 4x over-count. I own delivery and planning since Aug 2026; the lead engineer reviews and merges.

    LiteLLM · Python · AWS Bedrock · Athena · Terraform · Presidio

  • Bảo Bối — Voice Ordering Assistant · RAN IN A REAL CAFÉ

    A cat-mascot assistant for an F&B and AI-commerce company that suggests drinks by mood, takes the order by chat or voice (LiveKit), pushes it to the café's POS and returns a VietQR to pay. Version 1 ran in the café, with a loop that turns bad replies into scenarios staff can approve and a watchdog added after a silent LiveKit outage. Version 2 rebuilds it for many shops: a Go core, per-shop isolation with PostgreSQL row-level security and a Python LiveKit agent. May 2026 – Present.

    LiveKit · Go · Python · PostgreSQL RLS · VietQR

  • Admissions Chatbot & Advisor Cockpit · 97% OF AI DRAFTS ACCEPTED

    A 24/7 admissions chatbot and advisor cockpit on a live CRM for Hướng Nghiệp Á Âu, a 19-branch academy. After each customer message a background job drafts three replies and a lead summary; advisors accepted 97% of the drafts. The CRM is the only source for pricing and schedules, a course allow-list and topic pinning stop invented courses, and hybrid RAG mixes pgvector with Vietnamese full-text search. Sole developer, Apr – Sep 2026, handed over.

    Hybrid RAG · pgvector · Self-hosted VLM · On-prem

  • Multi-company Accounting SaaS · 20 ACCOUNTANTS DAILY

    A multi-company accounting platform built to Circular 99/2025 and used daily by 20 accountants. Built consolidated financial reporting under Circular 202 end to end (intercompany elimination, Excel export), plus fixed assets, loans and bank reconciliation; made posting safe with atomic batch posting and period locking; set up CI/CD from GitHub Actions to GHCR with Watchtower on the client's servers. Top contributor in a 3-engineer team, 2025 – Sep 2026, handed over.

    React · REST API · PostgreSQL · GitHub Actions · GHCR

  • IPBMS — Real-time Patient Monitoring · 84% FEWER FALSE ALARMS

    Fall and seizure detection on live RTSP camera streams with YOLO pose estimation and LLM-written incident reports, running on-site on two real cameras for Whammy Tech. A rule that needs five frames in a row before alerting cut false alarms by 84% across 4,000 test cases. AI Team Lead of four engineers, Jun 2025 – Jan 2026.

    YOLO Pose · OpenCV · RTSP · LLM Reports

  • NEURADAO — AI Trading Platform · LIVE IN 20 DAYS

    Led three engineers from an empty repository to a live AI trading platform in 20 days (Oct 2025): wrote the trading logic, AI chatbot and automation backend, and deployed on AWS.

    TypeScript · Python · PostgreSQL · AWS

  • Chord — TOKEN2049 Origins Runner-up · TOKEN2049 ORIGINS RUNNER-UP

    Chord is a startup project. I was part of its team at the TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon 2026 in Singapore, where we were named runner-up on the main track.

    Hackathon · Pitch

  • Viettel AI Race — 3D Gaussian Splatting · RUNNER-UP OF 1,628 TEAMS

    Novel view synthesis for the Viettel AI Race 2026: from photos with known camera positions, render what a camera would see from places it never visited. The qualifying rounds covered seven scenes, two objects and five aerial captures over Ho Chi Minh City; the final was one large urban scene scored on image quality, with inference time measured on an H200. Our three-person team, Zillexa, finished runner-up (top 4) out of 1,628 teams.

    3D Gaussian Splatting · PyTorch · gsplat · Multi-GPU · SCUNet

  • Cicca Fleet — Multi-site k3s Cluster · MULTI-ARCH · GITOPS

    Personal Kubernetes fleet spanning cloud VPS nodes and an ARM64 Orange Pi at home, meshed over Tailscale and managed fully by GitOps (ArgoCD app-of-apps). In-cluster container registry on MinIO, NFS storage from a Synology NAS, Grafana + Mimir + Loki + Alloy observability with alerting, public apps via Cloudflare Tunnel — this website is served from it.

    k3s · ArgoCD · Tailscale · Grafana LGTM

SKILLS

AI AGENTS & LLM
Claude Agent SDK & MCP · LiteLLM gateways & cost control · RAG (pgvector + full-text) · LiveKit voice agents · YOLO / OpenCV · Claude · OpenAI · Gemini · AWS Bedrock
BACKEND & FRONTEND
TypeScript · Python · Go · SQL · Node.js / NestJS · React / Next.js / TanStack · PostgreSQL / pgvector / Redis · REST & agent API design
CLOUD & DEVOPS
AWS · Docker · Kubernetes (k3s) + ArgoCD · GitHub Actions · GHCR · Watchtower · On-prem / VPN deployment · Observability
SPOKEN
Vietnamese (native) · English (written fluent, spoken intermediate)

EDUCATION & AWARDS

  • Chord — Runner-up, TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon 2026

    TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon 2026, Singapore: runner-up on the main track, US$10k AWS credits.

  • Viettel AI Race 2026 — Runner-up (Top 4) 2026

    Finalist out of 1,628 teams, organised by Viettel Group.

  • B.Eng. Software Engineering — FPT University 2026

    FPT University, Ho Chi Minh City · GPA 3.47 / 4.0 · 2026.

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