Yidong Liu

About

Yidong Liu
647-633-6603 | yidong.liu@alumni.utoronto.ca | Toronto, ON

I am a self-taught full-stack developer. My non-traditional path into software shaped how I learn: with humility, curiosity, and a habit of revisiting what I think I know. Engineering taught me to break large problems into smaller ones; software taught me to turn ambiguity into something real, then improve it through feedback. In the AI era, that ability to build, learn, and iterate matters even more: less dogma, more curiosity, and a tighter loop between ideas, tools, and results.

Skills

Core Engineering: Full-stack application development, TypeScript, API design and integration, internal tools, performance-minded UI work, rapid prototyping and iteration
Authentication & Identity: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, JWT, WebAuthn/passkeys, MFA and step-up authentication, Auth0 tenant configuration
Frontend & App Platforms: React, Next.js, Solid.js, Angular, TanStack Router, TanStack Query, Redux, MobX, Electron, CSS/SASS
Edge, Cloud & Data: Cloudflare Workers, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Queues, Containers, Drizzle ORM, Docker, Redis, MinIO
Developer Workflow: Git, GitHub Actions, pnpm, Nx, Jira, Figma, SonarQube

Experience

Software Engineer II, EQ Bank, Toronto February 2025 - Current

  • Created the company's first internal VS Code Copilot Agent plugin and introduced it within the team, moving AI usage from ad hoc prompting to a maintainable team workflow with shared skills, centralized updates, and IDE-level context from Jira, Figma, and SonarQube.

  • Leading the in-progress integration of Interac Sign-In Service by connecting EQ Bank's existing login flow to Interac's identity broker via SAML, enabling customers to use their bank credentials to sign in to supported government services.

  • Spearheaded the frontend migration of the core online banking platform from legacy HID to Auth0 (OAuth 2.0/OIDC), supporting a zero-downtime transition and contributing to EQ Bank becoming the first Canadian bank to offer passkey login.

  • Architected and developed the centralized Auth0 Universal Login Page used across EQ Bank platforms, using a modular design to maintain brand consistency, performance, and long-term maintainability.

  • Engineered a pluggable, decorator-based step-up authentication library using the Strategy Pattern, allowing developers to secure sensitive API methods through a declarative interface.

  • Designed a snapshot-and-resume workflow that captures application state before Auth0 MFA redirection and resumes interrupted API requests after authentication, reducing user friction during high-security flows.

Full Stack Software Developer, Plexxis Software, Brampton April 2023 - February 2025

  • Collaborated on a micro-frontend architecture to unify 10+ legacy products into a single web-based interface (React/Electron), enabling smoother cross-module workflows within a large-scale agile team.

  • Developed a custom, type-safe routing framework by forking TanStack Router to centralize RBAC and automate permission-based redirects across the product suite.

  • Contributed to the design of an optimistic UI system, implementing automated rollback mechanisms that improved perceived performance by 40% during high-latency API interactions.

  • Developed core features for an internal HR platform (Nest.js/React), including a real-time validation template system that reduced weekly timesheet submission time by 98% from 5+ minutes to under 5 seconds.

Personal Projects

Silvergrain / Personal Photography Portfolio Platform: yidong-liu.com

  • Designed and built a Cloudflare-native photography portfolio platform that powers my own portfolio and privately onboarded portfolios for other photographers through custom domain setup.

  • Implemented an edge-first architecture using Cloudflare Workers, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Queues, and Containers, with a dedicated image conversion pipeline and managed admin surface.

  • Built the application with SolidStart, TanStack Router, TypeScript, Drizzle ORM, and Cloudflare bindings, focusing on fast public pages, maintainable content management, and reliable image delivery.

  • Treated the project as an architecture and product-quality exercise rather than a commercial product, using it to explore practical tradeoffs in edge deployment, media processing, caching, and multi-site operations.

Chitchat: chitchat-laoke.vercel.app, GitHub: github.com/stevenlyd/chitchat

  • Developed a minimalist real-time chat application using Next.js, designed as a Progressive Web App for offline functionality and mobile installation.

  • Leveraged service workers for background sync and push notifications.

Open Source Contributions

TanStack Router: Reported an issue affecting route ID uniqueness, identified the root cause, and contributed test cases.
s3mini: Reported a reproducible bug in an S3-compatible client library; the issue was accepted and fixed upstream: codeberg.org/thinking_tools/s3mini/issues/2.

Education

BASc in Civil & Mineral Engineering, University of Toronto (St. George Campus), June 2019