profile

Profile

Hiroki Tamiya — a data platform engineer at a B2B SaaS company. He joined through an ads product, moved into data-platform development and operations, and now works on systems that combine AI and data platforms. On his own time he makes games as tamilabo.

1. Pocket computer years

   From his student days he made games on pocket computers (BASIC) and had friends play-test them. He saved his allowance to buy his first personal computer and became absorbed in programming.

   Skills

   • BASIC
   • C
   • C++
2. SES for DOCOMO

   At NEC he worked for NTT DOCOMO. One project allocated WCDMA radio bandwidth. In the server room, builds were moved on DAT tape, debugged with a debugger that broke on hex addresses, and memory dumps were written back to tape for later analysis.

   Because debugging was inefficient, he built a Windows support tool between tasks. It was well received on site and was later sold as a project tool. He did not receive proceeds from the sale.

   Another project was a phone conference system on Solaris in C/C++. For automatic voice response on incoming calls he built a custom script language with bison / lex / yacc, plus a leak-address tracing library to catch memory leaks.

   Skills

   • C
   • C++
   • Visual C++
   • Solaris
   • Linux
   • Unix
   • MySQL
   • PostgreSQL
   • bison
   • lex
   • yacc

3. 2005 — 2013

   From chimes to social games (into toC)

   From part-time work he built mobile content — chimes, mobile songs, i-appli — with PHP, Apache, and MySQL on data-center servers before cloud was mainstream. He developed and operated nearly ten sites.

   Around 2005 that led to Cave Co., Ltd., listed on mobile content, as a full-time hire. He continued shipping chimes, mobile songs, deco-mail, and kisekae tools — i-mode phone customization content — on PHP with Apache and Oracle 10g.

   While he was there, the social-game wave arrived. He was lead engineer on an original GPS simulation and two well-known IP titles. The first ran on KLab servers with on-site admins; release required overnight work with their ops team. After that experience, his team managed and operated cloud servers in-house from the second title onward.

   Skills

   • PHP
   • Perl
   • Apache
   • Nginx
   • CentOS
   • Debian
   • MySQL
   • Oracle 10g
   • Java
   • Flash
   • HTML/CSS
   • JavaScript (jQuery)

4. 2013 — 2022

   Mobile content and social games

   He left Cave Co., Ltd. in March 2013 and joined Fivestars Game Co., Ltd. in April 2013, moving from PHP to Ruby on Rails. The team built a Sengoku-era GvG battle game on AWS and shipped it. The service closed in a few months, but they licensed it to a Taiwanese game company. He traveled to Taiwan, met the local studio, and it launched on Taiwan Mobile.

   Then he shipped T-no-Mise for the TSUTAYA Online Game Platform in partnership with TSUTAYA. The service ran for several years and revenue continued to grow.

   He joined Plaid in October 2022. The company now runs a SaaS business; he also continued supporting T-no-Mise under a quasi-delegation contract as development and operations advisor.

   Skills

   • PHP
   • Ruby on Rails
   • Go
   • AWS
   • Google Cloud
   • IDC Cloud
   • Java (Android)
   • Swift (iOS)
   • Ansible
   • Chef
   • Full-stack
   • Infrastructure
   • Office network build-out
5. Cloud office in the pandemic (full remote era)

   At Fivestars Game Co., Ltd. he also built the office network infrastructure — line procurement and contracts, physical cabling, network configuration, and servers. The file server ran on that physical internal network.

   As remote work became normal and the office was downsized, he rebuilt every file server and similar system that had lived on the internal network onto Google Cloud. He built a zero-trust environment where every employee could access resources safely. The team started with VPN, but traffic to sites like YouTube also went through the tunnel and the load was too high, so they changed approach.

   Skills

   • Terraform
   • GitLab
   • GitHub
   • Google Cloud
   • GKE
   • Go

6. 2022 —

   Large-scale data processing, ads, data platforms (BtoBtoC)

   At Plaid since October 2022, he joined through an ads product and worked full-stack. Then he moved into data-platform development and operations — ETL, the warehouse, and transformation with dbt.

   He is now tech lead on new systems that combine AI and data-platform engineering, building mainly in TypeScript on AWS and Google Cloud.

   On his own time, he continues making games as tamilabo.

   Skills

   • TypeScript
   • React
   • Vue
   • Node.js
   • Google Cloud
   • Azure
   • AWS
   • Go
   • Java
   • Python