Victor Biederbeck

Bellevue, WA ·

I lead teams and make distributed services go brrrr, turning data into money.

More formally, I'm a tech and data enthusiast focusing on Linux, embedded systems, and open source software. For work, I have 10 years of experience leading teams of 3-10 individuals on projects in e-commerce, compliance, and cybersecurity.
At home, I self-host apps like Home Assistant, Nextcloud, and FreeIPA on Proxmox and Kubernetes which I manage with Ansible.

I'm most passionate about embedded computing, Python, FOSS, and information security. I have worked on projects in Bash, C#, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, PowerShell, Python, Ruby on Rails, and TI-Basic.

I host this site myself at linode.com (my favorite cloud provider), and you can view the code on GitHub.


Experience

Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Xero

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Led development of a Terraform-based New Relic dashboards-as-code project, delivering a standard observability solution across multiple New Relic accounts and hundreds of AWS services spanning Kubernetes, ECS, EC2, and SPA environments
  • Led development of a SQL query benchmarking and validation pipeline to verify correctness and measure performance before deployment
  • Built an AI-driven screenshot-to-dashboard automation workflow using the New Relic MCP, Terraform, and LLM agents, cutting dashboard creation time to less than 5 minutes
  • Developed a local semantic code search tool with Sentence Transformers, llama.cpp, and PyTorch, searching hundreds of files in seconds without any external API calls
September 2025 - Present

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

TikTok

Awards & Accomplishments

  • SRE on-call for TikTok Shop backend services during US launch
  • Created and maintained Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and technical documentation for payment, product, trade, and seller platforms, producing the first English technical docs for TikTok's e-commerce stack
  • Fine-tuned a BERT model to classify sensitive user data
  • Led team by setting up in-office team building activities, and onboarding multiple new hires
  • Developed compliance and remediation tooling to enforce security policy regarding ByteDance access to US TikTok user data
  • Developed semantic search article recommendation system for seller knowledge base (TikTok Seller University)
March 2023 - September 2025 (FTE)
June 2022 - March 2023 (Contractor)

Associate DevOps Engineer

Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA)

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Wrote Puppet code to implement alerts, automated remediation, health checks, and metrics for customer-facing applications in 20 different environments with Sensu, PagerDuty, and Prometheus
  • Used Puppet, Foreman, and Jenkins to collaborate with teammates and build and administer more than 2000 CentOS virtual machines running Java and PHP web applications with 250,000+ concurrent users at peak
  • Applied configuration-as-code principles to identity and access management (IAM) with Jenkins pipelines, automating access control with Active Directory, AWS, FreeIPA and OpenLDAP
  • Assisted in SOC2 audit with focus on Authentication and Authorization
August 2021 - June 2022

Client Integration Engineer 2

ZoomInfo

Guided developers in creating applications to integrate with the ZoomInfo API. Developed sample applications and use cases for the API to assist customers in using the ZoomInfo platform. Identified data quality and API issues using SQL queries and tools like DataDog and Snowflake.

Awards & Accomplishments

  • REST API consultant for customers and internal teams across ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, and NeverBounce, taking responsibility for any product with a customer-facing API or webhook
  • Implemented integrations for hundreds of customers with ZoomInfo products to platforms like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and WordPress
  • Identified health indicators for customer engagement with APIs and created reports and dashboards for sales teams to upsell or educate customers as appropriate
June 2020 - January 2021

Technical Support Engineer Level 2

Tripwire, Inc.

Departmental Subject Matter Expert for Tripwire Enterprise software. Led team in compliance with SLAs and performance objectives. Onboarded new level 1 hires. Set up and maintained virtual infrastructure used by the R&D and support departments. Served as an internal troubleshooting resource. Produced internal and external knowledge base articles. Documented, reproduced, and solved difficult-to-resolve customer issues.

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Project Manager for Salesforce REST-Client developed in C#
  • Recipient of 🔥 On Fire 🔥 Award
December 2019 - June 2020

Technical Support Engineer Level 1

Tripwire, Inc.

Supported agent-based SCM, SIEM, and File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) tools on Windows and Linux servers, and embedded systems ranging from substations to physical access control systems. Diagnosed and reproduced reported problems or configuration issues, provided temporary relief options, and followed issues through to resolution.

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Developed Node.js application with REST API using Express to emulate network device failure conditions for testing IoT monitoring solutions
  • Recipient of 💥 Spark 💥 Award
February 2019 - December 2019

Information Technology Consultant

BlockMint Technologies

Built out server infrastructure for crypto-mining, including temperature and humidity monitoring for the server room.

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Implemented IoT-based monitoring solution with Python, Arduino, and DHT11 temperature sensors
  • Assembled, tested, and installed more than 60 servers
  • Developed automated server inventory system using arp-scan and Bash
April 2018 - July 2018

Inventory and IT Specialist

Lloyd Central Pharmacy

Certified pharmacy tech, responsible for managing inventory of sterile and non-sterile lab equipment, drugs, controlled substances, supplements, and chemicals at multiple locations. Built and supported software across multiple sites, from vendor-site scrapers that informed purchasing decisions and forecast drug availability to an EHR system that replaced hard-copy records, complete with security controls and disaster recovery.

Awards & Accomplishments

  • Headed Ruby on Rails SaaS project for pharmaceutical compliance documentation
  • Developed a HIPAA-compliant EHR (Electronic Health Record) system with Synology NAS, including a solution for cloud backup to AWS Glacier and S3 and led a team to digitize over ten thousand paper health records
  • Wrote Python scripts to scrape pharmaceutical vendor websites for drug pricing and availability
  • Negotiated contract pricing with vendors to secure larger discounts and saved the company five figures in annual operating costs
  • Managed the supplement department, including key customer relationships, bringing in more than $30,000 in annual revenue
August 2015 - October 2018

Education

Western Governors University

Bachelor of Science, Information Technology
Highlighted Projects
  • Implemented HAProxy as a scalable load balancer against Docker Swarm Nginx cluster for capstone project
  • Designed server analytics stack using Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki and deployed with Docker Swarm
November 2020 - February 2022

Mt. Hood Community College

College Pre-requisites
Extra-curricular Activities
  • Forensics
  • Student Government
  • Student Representative to College Technology Council
September 2013 - July 2016

Fort Vancouver High School

Legal Magnet Program
Extra-curricular Activities
  • Student Government
  • Knowledge Bowl Team Captain
  • Mock Trial

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools

Portfolio

rtl8371c-re 5
Python

Reverse engineering the Realtek RTL8371C switch chip found in cheap managed switches.

View on GitHub
nugget
Python

A CLI chat interface for a locally-hosted Gemma model, built for privacy-conscious, self-hosted LLM workflows.

View on GitHub
docsForSteamClientAPI 3
Documentation

Community-driven documentation for Valve's undocumented Steam Client API.

View on GitHub
esp32-bluetooth-companion
Android · ESP32

An Android companion app for ESP32 hardware, built out of jealousy of the Flipper Zero app. Provides REPL, file transfer, telemetry, and notifications.

View on GitHub
spellbook
JavaScript

A speak-and-spell for the modern era: a single-page app with an electronic handheld idiom, built with Piper, Whisper, and retro vibes.

View on GitHub
wfpush-studio
Android · WebAssembly

A browser-based Wear OS watch face designer that builds and pushes a fully signed APK straight to a Pixel Watch over Wi-Fi — no Android Studio or Play Store, with APK builds compiled in-browser via WebAssembly.

Private repo
Bug Vision
Android · Camera2

A live camera app that approximates what a given insect sees, running the feed through a per-species eye plugin in real time. Tap the screen to cycle bugs.

Private repo
Share Router
Android

A share-target utility that intercepts shared links to strip tracking parameters and forward them to a self-hosted Wallabag instance, plus a GPX viewer that turns shared route files into tap-to-navigate waypoints.

Private repo

See more on GitHub →


Interests

I've always been drawn to understanding how complex systems work, whether that's distributed software, embedded hardware, biological systems, or machine learning. I spend much of my free time building tools, reverse engineering hardware, or experimenting with technologies that help me understand the world better.

I'm particularly interested in Linux, distributed systems, observability, networking, and self-hosted infrastructure. I enjoy designing systems that are reliable, inspectable, and independent of proprietary cloud services whenever practical. My homelab is both a proving ground for new ideas and the infrastructure that runs much of my daily life.

Recently, much of my work outside of work has focused on local AI: running language models, computer vision, and multimodal systems entirely on self-owned hardware, and building tools around semantic search, automation, and privacy-preserving workflows.

Outside of computing, I'm an amateur mycologist interested in fungal cultivation, microscopy, taxonomy, and mycoremediation. I enjoy applying the same engineering mindset to biology: building imaging systems, cataloging observations, and exploring how software can augment scientific hobbyists.

Other recurring rabbit holes include reverse engineering consumer hardware, embedded systems, photogrammetry, computer vision, RF engineering, and the occasional deep dive into quantum computing or materials science. I tend to collect projects more than hobbies, and I'm happiest when I'm learning something difficult enough that I don't yet know how it works.


Certifications

Issuing Authority Certification
AWSCertified Cloud Practitioner
AXELOSITIL 4 Foundation Certified
CIWUser Interface Designer
CompTIAA+ (Expired)
CompTIANetwork+ (Expired)
CompTIAProject+ (Expired)
CompTIASecurity+ (Expired)
LPILinux Essentials

The Lab

In my spare time, I like to tinker with technology.
A lot.
I have a very heterogeneous hardware stack consisting of 3 Raspberry Pis, an Nvidia Jetson Nano, and a few virtual machines running on AWS, Linode.com, and a local Proxmox server, which I manage using Ansible. In the past, I hosted workloads on Azure and Google Cloud Platform, but I have found that Linode and AWS suit my technology and pricing needs far better.

Besides servers, I have a MikroTik router, which I love, and a fleet of ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers that do things like track the temperature, which room I'm in, and start my tea kettle in the morning.

To tie all this together, I have a few software stacks running things like Home Assistant, Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki, which let me check on my fleet of servers, and make the hardware more accessible to the less technical stakeholders in my household.

Last but not least, this page is served from my Linode server, with the rest of the lab reachable from anywhere over my self-hosted VPN.