Taku Semba
Software engineer with 9 years of experience, starting with Android development and later expanding into backend, infrastructure, and data platforms. Enjoy building reliable systems and solving real problems through technology. Lived and worked in both Japan and Australia, currently based in Japan.
Career
Reiwa Travel, Inc.
- •Built and operated GraphQL APIs on Cloud Run and Cloud SQL, with infrastructure managed by Terraform.
- •Led projects as tech lead, including a loyalty rank program for 500K+ members and guest booking without sign-up.
- •Owned payments for tour and hotel bookings, and introduced fraud prevention with Forter.
- •Managed the tour search platform on Elasticsearch, including LLM-based tagging and ML-based recommendations.
- •Managed the data warehouse in BigQuery with dbt and Dataform, used across teams for analysis.
BILL Holdings Inc (formerly Invoice2go, Inc.)
- •Developed billing and payment features for an invoicing app, supporting PayPal, bank transfers, and credit cards.
- •Led the rebuild of the Android app from scratch with a team of 4–5 engineers in Australia, using Jetpack Compose.
- •Built CI/CD pipelines with Bitrise and GitLab, and improved test coverage to speed up development.
AbemaTV, Inc.
- •Developed and maintained video playback on Android for a 24/7 live streaming app with 1M+ monthly users, built on ExoPlayer.
- •Optimized video quality for each device and network, and protected content with DRM and AES encryption.
- •Built playback quality monitoring to track buffering, errors, and bitrate, and used it to fix viewing issues.
- •Published books on ExoPlayer and Kotlin, and spoke at DroidKaigi 2018 and 2020.
Education
Kobe University
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Washington
Electrical Engineering
Personal Projects
Poker Odds Calculator
A convenient tool for Texas Holdem Poker that calculates odds for any poker situation. The app features winning percentage/equity displays and detailed breakdowns of each hand's probability.
My Wordbook
A vocabulary app that helps users learn English words through personalized collections and a spaced repetition system. Features custom photo attachments and scheduled reviews that optimize memory retention from day one to six months.
Certificates
Google Cloud - Professional Cloud Architect
OSS
Spotlight
Android Library that lights items for tutorials or walk-throughs, etc.
MultiSnapRecyclerView
Android library for multiple snapping of RecyclerView.
go-hls-hosting
Generates LIVE, CHASE playlists from your given VOD playlist, then publish their playlists individually.