Objective

Experienced Engineering Lead/Manager with a strong background in backend engineering, specializing in creating APIs and web applications using Node.js, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java. Proven track record in agile software development and building scalable solutions, including high-volume streaming API for Medicare claims and the software that presented election results for the New York Times. Eager to leverage both technical expertise and software delivery skills for an organization with a public-facing mission and a strong culture of collaboration.

Code

  • Python · Flask · FastAPI
  • Node.js · Express · Javascript
  • Ruby · Ruby on Rails
  • Jekyll · Bridgtown · Hugo
  • Skeleton · Bulma · TailwindCSS
  • C · C++ · Go · Bash
  • Java · Scala · Spark
  • Scheme · Lisp · Clojure
  • MySQL · Postgres · Sqlite
  • Kafka · GRPC · Protobuf

Tools

  • Amazon Web Services
  • Terraform · IaC
  • Monitoring · Telemetry
  • On-call · PagerDuty
  • Docker · CloudFoundry
  • Scraping · ETL · Airflow
  • Splunk · Kinesis · ELK
  • Temporal · Lambda Step Functions
  • Redis · Elasticsearch
  • Web Accessibility

Career

  • Data Journalism
  • Web Frameworks
  • Accessibility · WCAG
  • REST · OpenGraph · GRPC
  • Microservices · Monorepos
  • Self-directed remote worker
  • Agile · Kanban · SAFe
  • Experienced engineering manager
  • Federal procurement · Compliance

Employment

Supervisory IT Specialist, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ()
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a small federal agency founded in 2010 and dedicated to financial education, regulation and enforcement. The Design & Development (D&D) team within CFPB handles a variety of print and digital design, as well as software development responsibilities. Supervised 12 software engineers distributed across 5 different engineering teams, following a matrix model of management.
  • Application Development Lead Member of D&D’s leadership team. Oversaw technical standards for engineering practices and helped teams to anticipate and handle bureaucratic roadblocks, resulting in fewer surprises and improved team productivity. Supported teams building web applications in Django with Javascript or React frontends, the Wagtail CMS and SQL backends.
  • Supervisory IT Specialist Supervised 12 software engineers distributed across 5 different engineering teams. This included teams working on the CFPB website, consumer-facing tools, internal products for enforcement practices and software for receiving and handling consumer complaints. Conducted regular 1-1s with all my direct report as well as performance reviews. Re-established dormant engineering practices like syncs and training.
  • Contracting Officer Representative (Level 1) Certified as a COR Level 1 in the federal government. Managed the the procurement, payment and even the wind-down of several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products used by developers within D&D. Ensured services obtained their necessary Authorizations To Use (ATUs) for Deque AXE, Sauce Labs, Netlify and Mapbox.
Senior Engineering Lead / Engineering Manager, Nava PBC ()
Nava is a public benefit corporation that contracts with both federal and state government agencies to build custom software and thoughtfully apply technology to serve the American public.
  • Quality Payments Program (QPP) Submissions API Joined the team as a senior engineer building an API for accepting millions of data submissions. Learned Express on Node.js on the job. Created a more flexible library for test data to expand test coverage and improve developer experience. Built the initial version of the scoring engine that would process doctor submissions and calculate scores with bulk SQL operations based on formulas defined by Medicare staff. Consulted on a revamp in Apache Spark and Parquet after prototyping in Luigi and Airflow. Moved into role of Senior Tech Lead and managed up to 9 engineers on project as both engineering lead and people manager. Worked closely with product and project managers to plan out our work using Scrum, coordinating with 14 other scrum teams on the project in the Scaled Agile Framework.
  • CMS Cloud IT Operations (CLOUD ITOPS) Identified needs for and implemented custom tooling for infrastructure security and compliance requirements. Built tools in Go to address gaps in CloudFoundry’s capabilities. Implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) in Terraform. Served as the people manager for 6 engineers.
  • Medicare Replicated Data Access (RDA) API Led the Replicated Data Access (RDA) API of 3 engineers, building a GRPC-based API in Java to store and stream millions of Medicare claims to other parts of the organization. Served as an effective people manager for 10 engineers across the company. Successfully expanded project scope to include an orchestration pipeline using AWS Lambda Step Functions to ingest claims data from COBOL format files. Managed the rollout and launched to production with 99.999% uptime and extremely low costs over lifetime of project. Consulted on several other contract modifications and built a pilot prototype allowing Medicare to receive patient survey information via the FHIR format.
  • Business Development Work Participated in multiple bid teams to craft proposals and implement technical challenges to win new contracts. Worked closely with business development to research the technical landscape and propose our unique approach for any bid proposal, including architecture diagrams, staffing and cost estimates, QASPs or other measures of success as well as our proposed timelines and milestones.
  • Engineering Management Regularly managed 6-12 engineers, coaching their career development through weekly 1:1s and regular performance check-ins. Guided multiple junior engineers to senior roles and also into engineering management. Received accolades in 360-degree reviews for building supportive teams and proactively addressing delivery problems.
Innovation Specialist, 18F, General Services Administration ()
18F was a “government startup” within the General Services Administration the consulted on custom software for other federal agencies. We followed modern practices and built open-source software informed by user research and agile planning.
  • MyUSA A precursor to login.gov, MyUSA provided single-sign-on (SSO) for multiple government sites and allowed users to control what information they shared. Helped to build out the backend server in Ruby on Rails. Also contributed to frontend in JQuery and vanilla Javascript.
  • Micro-purchase Launched an experiment that allowed government agencies to pay for custom software development with the easier micro-purchase approach for procurement. Built a robust web application in Ruby on Rails to run reverse auctions where developers could bid on small coding projects from government agencies.
  • FBI Crime Data Explorer Worked with other engineers and stakeholders to modernize how the FBI published crime data online. Learned Python to work with another senior developer on the project. Built a RESTful API with Django, PostgreSQL and SQLAlchemy used by the visual explorer website. Created new SQL queries to generate reports that weren’t possible with prior data formats. Created tools to generate open data downloads.
  • Confidential Survey Designed a prototype in Ruby on Rails for conducting surveys that aggregate demographic data while protecting user privacy, ensuring secure data collection practices for sensitive data.
Senior Software Architect, The New York Times ()
In 2007, I was a co-founder of the Interactive Newsroom Technologies Team, a startup-like group embedded within the newsroom that creates news-driven web applications on agile timeframes. Here are some of our more notable projects.
  • Elections (2008-2014) Paired with another developer to build the initial version of a new and better election results loader in time for the 2008 general election. Enhanced it over the years to improve performance and functionality and handle primaries and general elections from 2008 to 2014, as well as for the NYC mayoral election in 2013. Built in Ruby on Rails with bulk SQL operations for performance. Operated as a modular REST microservice that shared data to website, generated graphics and result tables and even built graphics for the print newspaper. Architected to use static page generation and reverse caching to handle tremendous amounts of web traffic with minimal resources.
  • Olympics Results (2010/2012) Helped to architect and build a backend service and admin in Ruby on Rails to process a firehose of XML data provided by the International Olympic Committee into a SQL DB with a RESTful API. This service populated pages, visualizations and interactive widgets for both the web and print. Also helped to architect the successor system built for the 2012 London Olympics.
  • Wikileaks War Logs When Wikileaks provided the Times with leaked military dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan, built an internal web admin in Ruby on Rails used by reporters to search and analyze the data for stories. Included an ETL process to extract and geocode locations within the text. Also contributed research and pitched a graphic to accompany a story about a surge of sectarian violence in Baghdad after the US invasion.
  • PUFFY In 2009, we created a site for readers to upload and share their photos from the inauguration of President Obama. Built on this prototype to create a tool in Ruby on Rails called PUFFY (for Photo Upload Form For You) that allowed editors to moderate reader-submitted photos in 30+ projects. For one of these named “A Moment in Time,” more than 10,000 readers submitted geotagged photos taken at the same time across the Earth.
  • Open Source Spearheaded new open-source initiatives at the NYT and improved outreach for people to use public APIs from the New York Times. Helped to create and wrote early content for NYT Open, which still runs to this date.
  • @nytimes Twitter Account One afternoon in 2007, created the @nytimes twitter account and built a custom posting bot as a simple Ruby script. Expanded it into an admin interface in Ruby on Rails that fed stories from RSS feeds into 80+ Twitter accounts associated at the Times. Ran operations for social media for several years before handing off to the new social media team at the NYT.
  • Times Haiku After the 2012 election, built a bot in Ruby that scanned Times articles to find haiku embedded within them. This became a whimsical and official NYT Tumblr blog of curated haiku that ran from 2013 to 2017, posting thousands of found haiku.
Software Developer, Alacra, Inc. ()
Alacra resells financial content from over 80 different databases to financial and legal firms. My role there was R&D and rapid development, particularly in projects that combined content from multiple databases. I also built a custom web crawler and a parser to leverage the new XML and XSLT standards.

Education

B.S., Computer Science (Minor: Literature), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ()
Concentration of studies: operating systems, software engineering, programming languages and compilers.
M.Eng., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ()
Thesis: Lightweight Object-Oriented Shared Variables for Distributed Applications on the Internet