As a senior staff engineer, I oversee a large part of the design and implementation of projects spanning our Orchestration and Data divisions at Braze. I work with engineering and product leaders to implement new processes and refine existing ones, as well as work deeply within teams to drive technical excellence and implement special projects.

Achievements:

• Led several initiatives around modularization of all major product areas within the Braze product to improve team independence, autonomy, and scope of ownership. Tactical projects from this effort have driven millions in COR reduction and increased new feature development speed across over a dozen teams.
• Built on the Messaging Pipeline Architecture work outlined below to design and implement frameworks elsewhere in our product, decreasing cognitive complexity and drastically decreasing feature development speed, support burden, and new bugs.
• Consistently executed on projects to improve operational efficiency, including page/error federation to teams, ground-up re-architecture of features to improve stability, and human process enhancements around page and incident management and follow-up.
• Regularly answered questions and hosted information sessions on topics ranging from deep internal details on how Braze's messaging pipeline works, to customer use-cases in Canvas, to nuances in Braze's MongoDB cluster topology. Many of these sessions have been turned into onboarding videos for teams in and outside of engineering.
• Redefined the fundamental structure of the messaging pipeline into a component-wise architecture that promoted SOLID software engineering principles and distributed component ownership.

I spent two years as an Engineering Manager for the Messaging and Automation and Core Messaging teams, managing 10 engineers.

Achievements:

• Split the Messaging and Automation Team into two teams: Messaging and Automation, and Core Messaging, with the Messaging and Automation team focused on Canvas, and the Core Messaging Team focused on message sending infrastructure. Managed both teams for several months, with each team having improved agility due to separation of concerns.
• Facilitated the team's development of Canvas Flow, a major iteration of Braze's flagship product, using fundamentally new backend and frontend paradigms iteratively over several quarters.
• Promoted and led cross-team initiatives like Engineering Lunch and Learns, Postgres/Content Cards stability working group, On-call Committee, Braze's Beacon product system, and more.
• Executed on a number of transformative or high-value projects requiring specialty knowledge or skills, such as implementing a job processing back-pressure system to reduce critical incidents and deprecating "Original IAMs" to save money on infrastructure.
• Owned the decision, purchase, and integration of CodeClimate Velocity to provide additional visibility for both EMs and ICs at Braze to drive continuous improvement.

I spent my first year at Braze as a Senior Software Engineer.

Achievements:

• Created or enhanced high-scale features of our messaging pipeline, such as Frequency Capping, Rate/Volume Limiting, and "X Events in Y Time" Segmentation Rules.
• Re-engineered local development paradigm using Docker Compose. Migrated most CI work to Buildkite with Knapsack, reducing build times by over 50 percent. Integrated CodeCov, Danger, and various static analysis tools to build process.
• Realized the need for a cross-team task force to implement Postgres at scale (Amazon Aurora). Coordinated with multiple stakeholders across product management, DevOps, and engineering teams to deliver the much-anticipated Content Cards feature more rapidly.
• Implemented Datadog APM and metrics integration in platform code, allowing the organization to migrate away from New Relic to a better and less expensive observability solution. Educated other engineers on how to use both basic and advanced features of the Datadog platform.
• Provided essential engineering support for urgent issues, culminating in design and implementation of org-wide on-call rotation.

Technologies used:

• Ruby
• Rails
• Sidekiq
• MongoDB
• Redis
• Memcached
• PostgreSQL
• Kubernetes
• Terraform

While I was in college, as well as after college, I ran a successful software consulting company.

Achievements

• Produced an iPad application using an agile methodology to provide teachers with an efficient interface for rapidly capturing evidence of students learning.
• Assisted in litigation research and code review for a variety of technology patents involving mobile operating systems, audio encoding/decoding, engine micro-controller design, sensor fusion algorithms, and human-computer interaction.
• Assembled a data-cleaning and machine learning research pipeline to ingest patient data for prison populations to predict the likelihood of suicide to automatically flag high-risk patients.
• Implemented a commonly used Timeline Follow-Back survey as an online service to aid in collecting of research data for Renée Martin-Willett at UC Boulder.
• Produced a Python 3 application performance monitoring (APM) solution for on-premise or SaaS deployment. The software could record data, display graphs, and execute local or remote scripts.
• Finalized and verified the correctness of a plugin for HPE LoadRunner for performance testing of various IoT protocols.
• Developed a SaaS application for scoring texts according to decoding difficulty for researchers at Vanderbilt University.
• Migrated a YouTube-like web application from Rackspace to AWS and upgraded foundational technologies in the process (upgraded Django, moved to NGINX, moved to Waitress, etc.).
• Designed and implemented an Android tablet application for interviewing and surveying refugees who may have limited prior exposure to technology or limited literacy or numeracy skills.
• Developed an Android application for detection of neonatal jaundice via typical 3rd-world smartphone hardware in coalition with the research group of Prof. Chetan Patil at Temple University.

Technologies used:

• Python
• Java
• Django
• Android
• C/C++
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL