Summary
I am an engineering lead active in software development, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and software leadership. I enjoy helping teams realize the value of their work by improving the quality and speed of software delivery.
I am interested in remote opportunities and my ideal role is as a tech lead or engineering manager, supporting small to medium-sized teams.
Specialties
I write code day-to-day in Python, but am also familiar with Ruby, Go, Bash, and TypeScript.
I am deeply familiar with how the Django web framework works, but also have a solid understanding of Express, Rails, and Serverless Framework.
I am proficient with infrastructure tooling, such as Ansible, AWS SAM, Docker, GitHub Actions, Packer, Terraform, and Vagrant.
I have managed multiple production systems in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem and have a strong understanding of API Gateway, Batch, ECS, ElastiCache, IAM, Kinesis, Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, and VPC.
I have maintained and tuned a wide variety of data stores. I am deeply familiar with PostgreSQL, but also understand how Memcached, MySQL, Redis, and Riak work.
Experiences
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Increased observability across applications by integrating Datadog for log, metric, and trace aggregation. This enabled us to isolate and fix key application performance issues.
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Helped establish a process to prioritize and address technical debt alongside existing work streams. This empowered engineers to advocate for improvements to enhance application sustainability.
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Instituted a team-wide system for making architecturally significant decisions. This standardized and increased transparency around our engineering decision-making processes.
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Forged relationships with external teams (e.g., Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, upstream and downstream consumers) to better negotiate cross-team dependencies. This enabled us to ship complex feature sets and integrations sooner, and with fewer setbacks.
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Helped scale cloud-based lab operations software from a single instance, to multiple instances, each supporting distinct geographic locations. This enabled us to grow our business.
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Developed tooling to repeatably apply database schema changes across all lab software instances. This reduced the number of mistakes we made due to manually applied database schema changes.
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Built Amazon Lambda-based processes to automate the aggregation of application data into a centralized data lake. This enabled our data analytics teams to generate insights about our business.
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Instituted organization-wide system for making architecturally significant decisions. This standardized and increased transparency around our engineering decision-making process.
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Iteratively improved the engineering hiring process by introducing an apprenticeship program, standardized application assessment, and on-site interview loop. This made us feel better about our hiring practices.
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Helped hire software engineers across teams, conducted performance reviews, and aided in peer professional development. This gave me a new perspective on what it means to be an engineering leader.
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Assembled cross-functional working groups to address organization-wide issues around business development and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This helped break down organizational silos.
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Instituted an engineering growth ladder. This improved clarity in our growing engineering organization.
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Founded the organization’s first web application infrastructure team. This enabled us to scale the engineering organization.
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Assembled software delivery pipelines with reproducible development environments, immutable deployment artifacts, and infrastructure as code (IaC). This standardized our application delivery processes.
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Built and maintained a set of open-source Terraform and Ansible modules for cross-project use. This improved our infrastructure component reusability and aided in recruiting.
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Defined an incident response procedure to catalog production issues blamelessly. This added structure to our incident response process across teams and enabled us to better learn from our mistakes.
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Participated in technical pre-sales engagements with companies across the country. This improved the effectiveness of our sales cycles.
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Maintained official Chef cookbooks for Riak and Riak CS. This provided our users with standardized ways to install our products.
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Built tooling around Docker, Datomic, Omnibus, and Vagrant for the Riak ecosystem. This made it easier for users to integrate our products with other common tools in the ecosystem.
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Automated the end-to-end data preparation and publishing process for core data sets. This enabled us to focus on more sophisticaed data sets.
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Converted an SEC filings full-text search prototype into a cloud-native service with a distributed data ingestion pipeline and search index. This led to our very first interactive data product.
Community Involvement
I participated in several rounds of mock interviews with boot camp students. In those meetings, I provided feedback on resume, interview responses, and career path choices.
I co-founded a modern software leadership focused book club in Philadelphia. I helped recruit speakers, panel moderators, and attendees interested in software leadership.
I led students (ages 8-18) through basic web development projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I also streamlined student and volunteer on-boarding processes with documentation and virtual email accounts.
I co-founded the first DevOps focused user group in Philadelphia. I worked to grow a community for individuals interested in bridging the gap between development and operations.