Staff Engineer @ Sony 🇱🇹 Vilnius Roots 👨‍👧‍👦 Father of 3 🌴 San Diego, CA

Engineering from the inside out — distributed systems & garage machines.

Hey, I’m Zilvinas. I’m a father of 3, an engineer building resilient backend architectures that don't break, a hands-on Porsche wrencher, and someone who’s happiest pulling a fresh Breville latte, catching waves at Torrey Pines, or spinning vinyl through a 5.1 surround rig.

Porsche DIY & AX #827 Torrey Pines Surf CrossFit Grit Breville Lattes Klipsch 5.1 Vinyl

Explore Passions & Life What I Build By Day

human-and-engineer.json authentic

{
  "name": "Zilvinas Vilutis",
  "dayJob": "Staff Software Engineer @ Sony",
  "roots": "Vilnius, Lithuania 🇱🇹",
  "home": "San Diego, CA 🌴",
  "dailyRitual": {
    "coffee": "Breville home-pulled latte (AM & post-lunch) ☕",
    "surfSpot": "Torrey Pines State Beach 🏄‍♂️",
    "audioRig": "Sony TT ➔ $7 Technics ➔ Klipsch 5.1 Reference 🎵",
    "onRepeat": ["Daft Punk", "Fatboy Slim", "Linkin Park", "Vytautas Kernagis 🇱🇹", "Bob Marley"]
  },
  "passions": {
    "family": "Father of 3 + family pup 🐕",
    "cars": "Porsche Wrenching & PCA Autocross (AX #827) 🏎️",
    "outdoors": "Torrey Pines surf, SD trail hikes & waterfall swims 🥾",
    "food": "Lithuanian Traditional 🇱🇹 & Persian Kebabs 🥙"
  },
  "mindset": "Understand the machine, respect tolerances, build to last."
}

Life Beyond the Terminal

The 6 Pillars That Keep Me Fired Up

Life is meant to be lived with high curiosity, grease on your hands, salt in your hair, heavy barbells, and great music spinning.

1. DIY Wrenching, Topless Driving & Autocross

PCA Autocross (AX #827) & Open-Air Wrenching

There is nothing quite like dropping the top on a sunny California morning and hearing a flat-six engine sing right behind your head. I have owned and maintained 3 Boxsters (986 S manual, 987 manual, 981 PDK), a 911 (997.2 manual), and 2 Macans.

On weekends, you’ll find me on the track pushing the limits with PCA Autocross in my 981 Boxster (#827) — dialing in tire pressures, trail braking, and mastering car control at the limit. In the garage, I do my own maintenance: fluid flushes, brake jobs, diagnostics, and preventative care from first principles.

Autocross AX #827 Driving Topless DIY Garage Maintenance Boxsters, 911 & Macans

2. The Daily Brew

Home-Crafted Breville Lattes

Coffee is more than caffeine — it’s a tactile morning ritual. I dial in fresh whole beans on my Breville espresso machine to pull a rich double shot with silky steamed microfoam.

Morning Ritual: Fresh home-pulled latte to kickstart the day.

Post-Lunch Ritual: Afternoon latte for focused architectural deep work.

Hydration (#2): Pure ice-cold water all day long.

Breville Espresso Water #2

3. Physical Grit

CrossFit & Powerlifting

High-capacity engineering requires high-capacity physical endurance. I train both heavy compound powerlifting (squats, deadlifts, presses) and high-intensity CrossFit functional workouts.

The discipline of pacing through a grueling WOD and executing calmly under redline fatigue mirrors managing complex distributed systems under extreme load.

Heavy Compounds CrossFit WODs Mental Stamina

4. Analog Acoustics

Vinyl Rig & Half-Audiophile

In a digital world, I love the analog warmth of vinyl. My setup is pure passion: a Sony automatic turntable running into a lucky $7 garage-sale Technics receiver, powering a Klipsch Reference 5.1 surround sound setup (2 full towers & center channel up front, sub & surrounds in the back).

Electronic & House: Daft Punk, Fatboy Slim

Rock & Energy: Linkin Park (almost all albums), The Beatles

Roots & Soul: Vytautas Kernagis 🇱🇹, Bob Marley

Sony TT + $7 Technics Klipsch 5.1 Reference

5. Travel, Hiking & Waterfalls

Wild Waterfalls, SD Trails & Family

I live for spontaneous travel and exploring new territory. Whether hiking peaks all around San Diego County, swimming under remote tropical waterfalls, or discovering local street food spots, being outside is where I recharge.

At the heart of it all: sharing adventures, traditional Lithuanian feasts (cepelinai & šaltibarščiai) and Persian kebabs with my 3 kids and our family pup 🐕.

SD Trails Waterfall Dips 3 Kids & Dog Lithuanian & Persian

6. Beach & Surf

Torrey Pines Swells & Coastal Life

Moving to San Diego meant falling in love with the Pacific. My home break is Torrey Pines State Beach. Paddling out past the surf, sitting in the lineup with pelicans gliding overhead, and catching clean morning waves provides the ultimate mental clarity. It's the purest reset from the digital world.

Home Break: Torrey Pines State Beach, San Diego

Ritual: Dawn patrol & morning ocean sets

Torrey Pines Lineup Pacific Swells San Diego Ocean

Engineering Ethos

How I Think & Build

The bridge between mechanical wrenching and distributed systems architecture.

First-Principles Diagnostics

Whether isolating an engine misfire or diagnosing a high-load latency spike across microservices, I don't guess. I break systems down to their fundamentals, inspect the tolerances, and solve the root cause rather than patching symptoms.

Resilience Over Complexity

The best architecture is simple, decoupled, and self-healing. I design gateways and event streams that protect upstream services, handle unexpected traffic surges without breaking a sweat, and never wake teams up at 3 AM.

Continuous Craft & AI Velocity

I love adopting modern tools that accelerate execution — from Generative AI developer agents to rapid POC prototyping — allowing small, focused teams to achieve monumental engineering velocity.

Career & Platforms

Where I've Built Over 20 Years

A high-level view of the mission-critical platforms I’ve helped architect and scale.

Staff Software Engineer

SONY • Sony Engagement Platform Services (SEPS)

Nov 2025 – Present San Diego, CA

Driving architecture and zero-to-one engineering for Sony's global digital engagement and payments platform, powering services across PlayStation and consumer ecosystem.

Zero-to-One Token Exchange Platform: Architected and delivered a high-throughput, decoupled Token Exchange Gateway from scratch, standardizing authentication across distributed backend microservices.
API Gateway & Auth Decoupling: Led Kong API Gateway integration and decoupled auth validation, offloading 100% of JWT parsing overhead and eliminating downstream latency bottlenecks.
SEPS Payments API Resilience: Re-architected core payments services for high availability, zero-downtime deployments, and fault tolerance under high holiday load.
GenAI Developer Acceleration: Pioneered AI-driven test automation and developer workflows (Cursor, AI coding agents), boosting team delivery velocity by 25%.

Ecosystem & Core Infrastructure

PlayStation Ecosystem

Kong Gateway

AWS EKS

Java / Spring Boot Kong API Gateway JWT / OAuth2 AWS EKS Docker GenAI Developer Tooling

Staff Software Engineer

OKTA • Fine-Grained Authorization (OpenFGA)

Sep 2024 – Oct 2025 San Diego, CA

Architected and scaled OpenFGA (Fine-Grained Authorization), solving graph-based relationship-based access control (ReBAC) latency bottlenecks at enterprise scale.

40% Latency Reduction: Overhauled complex `ListObjects` graph traversal query latency by 40% through DynamoDB precomputed caching and intelligent index structures.
Zero-Downtime Streaming ETL: Engineered streaming Kafka/DynamoDB replication tools enabling continuous schema evolutions and zero data loss across high-throughput clusters.
Distributed Resilience: Designed multi-region failover and distributed rate-limiting algorithms to safeguard authorization endpoints under multi-tenant enterprise traffic.

Platform & Open-Source Projects

OpenFGA (ReBAC)

Amazon DynamoDB

Apache Kafka

Go (Golang) OpenFGA / ReBAC AWS DynamoDB Kubernetes Streaming ETL Distributed Caching

Staff Software Engineer

INTUIT • Identity & Authentication Platforms

Jul 2021 – Feb 2024 San Diego, CA

Led architecture for core identity and device security services safeguarding 100M+ TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Credit Karma users.

Billion-Scale Event Streaming: Architected real-time identity event pipelines processing 1B+ events/day using Apache Pulsar, Kafka, and AWS Lambda, improving event delivery SLA to 99.99%.
Account Takeover (ATO) Prevention: Designed Customer Device Management security infrastructure, detecting anomalous auth attempts in real-time and thwarting fraud attempts.
Monolith to Microservices: Spearheaded the decomposition of legacy identity monoliths into domain-driven microservices running on AWS EKS and DynamoDB.

Consumer Products & Platforms Protected

QuickBooks

Apache Pulsar

Java / Kotlin / Go Apache Pulsar Kafka AWS Lambda / EKS DynamoDB ATO Fraud Prevention

Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead

GRID DYNAMICS • E-Commerce Search Scaling

Aug 2016 – Aug 2021 SF Bay Area, CA

Led technical consulting and architectural scaling for Fortune 500 retail giants, optimizing mission-critical search engines for peak e-commerce traffic.

10x TPS Search Engine Scaling: Re-architected retail search infrastructure for Macy's & Bloomingdale's on Apache Solr with distributed index sharding across hundreds of nodes.
Zero-Downtime Peak Traffic: Engineered real-time index synchronization and automated health checks, reducing search downtime during Black Friday to 0.

Retail Consultations & Engagements

Macy's

The Home Depot

Apache Solr

Apache Solr Elasticsearch Java / Spring Distributed Indexing High-Throughput Search

Senior Solutions Architect & Lead Engineer

EIS GROUP • Core Insurance & Policy Platforms

Feb 2006 – Jul 2016 (10 Years) San Francisco, CA & Vilnius

A foundational decade progressing from Test Automation Engineer to Senior Solutions Architect, designing enterprise insurance engines, rating systems, and banking integrations.

Core Domain Architecture: Performed architectural review and provided domain model designs for Group Benefits insurance line in the Policy Administration System (census upload, quote variation, multi-endorsement forms).
Bank of America NACHA Integration: Engineered automated payment reconciliation and direct debit engines handling millions in recurring policy premiums.
Framework Standardization & Mentorship: Guided 10+ engineers through technical mentorship and code reviews, reducing integration defects by 30%.
10-Year Career Growth: Progressed from QA & Test Automation Engineer (2006) to Senior Software Engineer (2010) to Senior Solutions Architect (2014).

Insurance & Banking Clients