Summary | Distributed Systems & Data Storage expert, with over 10 years experience leading teams that build & operate databases, distributed file systems and API services. Seeking a technical leadership role with a highly-skilled team working at the cutting edge of data storage and processing technology, with scope ranging from high-level architectural roadmaps to fine-grained performance analysis and debugging, to direct customer engagement and intra-company training & mentorship. |
Experience | Stripe: Staff Software Engineer (Online Databases) Jul 2021 - Present - Tech lead for MProxy: Stripe's authentication, sharding, load-shedding and fault-tolerance proxy fronting a large fleet of MongoDB instances. In the critical path for all Stripe APIs, customer-facing dashboards and administrative tools.
- Enabled product teams to adopt transactions by leading the effort to incorporate an atomic batch write interface into MProxy's gRPC API, updating client libraries and working closely with customers on enablement. Commissioned and supervised Jepsen safety analysis of target MongoDB version by outside vendor, providing Stripe with confidence in the database's snapshot isolation properties.
- Authored several proposals that were delegated to or picked up by colleagues: cross-shard batch write API, mTLS authorization for access to DB nodes, automated release qualification & rollbacks, SLO-driven alerts, proxy partitions by traffic class.
Google: Staff Software Engineer (SRE), Tech Lead / Manager Feb 2018 - Jul 2021 - Founding manager for API Infrastructure SRE. Hired 6 ICs and authored roadmap to enhance reliability of infrastructure used by all of Google's public APIs to enforce policy such as: quota, billing, authentication & authorization, organization policies, etc.
- Completed regionalization of the run-time policy engine, to limit blast radius of incidents, and achieve 99.999%+ availability per GCP region. Automated new-region turn-up, outbound RPC scope enforcement, and capacity planning.
- Deprecated a 15+ year old centralized API proxy and migrated 1000+ APIs to a distributed proxy architecture, improving isolation and cost efficiency, and enabling gRPC for a large number of legacy APIs. Personally implemented a Go server to replace the multi-API centralized batch service at googleapis.com/batch.
Mixpanel: Software Engineer (Ingestion & Storage Infrastructure) Aug 2016 - Feb 2018 - First Seattle hire and site lead for the Mixpanel Seattle engineering office. Conducted over 50 candidate interviews, met with candidates in the area and planned off-site recruiting events with the team, allowing us to grow from 3 to 15 FTEs in Seattle over 6 months. Responsible for office space planning and developing the office culture.
- Designed and built data migration and comparison pipeline for moving Mixpanel's proprietary column-oriented OLAP database from bare-metal servers to GKE.
- Led re-write of Mixpanel's Import API server in Go, adding support for arbitrary-length data streams. Added support to the API server and Arb database backend for 3rd party datasets, and built out a proof-of-concept integration with Google BigQuery and a production integration with Salesforce.
- Service owner for Edge Infrastructure: DNS, TLS & Load Balancing. Rolled out HTTP/2 support to nginx load balancers, decreasing page load time by 50%.
Google: Senior Systems Engineer (SRE) January 2012-Aug 2015 in New York NY (Offline / Archival storage)
Sep 2015 - Aug 2016 in Kirkland, WA (In-memory filesystem & caching). - Tech Lead for 15 SRE team in Kirkland & Sydney, operating a high-performance disaggregated memory distributed file system used by Google BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow and internal OLAP products.
- Led the engineering engagement with Google's second vendor for tape library hardware: drove feature requests & bug fixes in the vendor's firmware, built a real-time analytics dashboard reporting on performance of vendor's hardware, and implemented a new hardware qualification and regression test suite; these were used to make $XXMM purchasing decisions and were used in price negotiations with other vendors.
- Pitched and led project to incorporate tape drive and library equipment into automated datacenter hardware lifecycle management software. Included designing and implementing fault detection software that analyzed terabytes of log data hourly, and building workflows for hardware decom and repairs.
Posse.com: Software Engineer July 2011 - December 2011 - Founding team member at Sydney-based social-commerce startup Posse.com. Developed app using Grails, MySQL, JavaScript, Facebook & Twitter APIs.
University of New South Wales: Computer Science Tutor January 2008 - November 2011 - Tutored first year C programming and data structures several times, Security Engineering in semester 1 2010, Software Construction in semester 1 2011. Involved teaching classes of 10-20 students, preparing and grading assignments, and grading examinations.
University of New South Wales: Research Assistant November 2007 - March 2008 - Worked with Dr. Andrew J Taylor to develop software systems for the continuous remote monitoring of the vocalizations of a curious parrot.
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Education | University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) Honours Class I & University Medal
University of Texas at Austin Exchange semester credited towards BSc at UNSW GPA 4.0 and University Honors
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Misc | - Side-project hacking includes:
- Radiopaper, a troll-resistant social network
- ddns, an open source DynDNS-compatible server for Cloud DNS
- lifesim.c6e.me, a retirement savings Monte-Carlo simulator
- BrightNet, a TLS-SNI inspecting content filter for OpenWRT
- Google NY Corporate Sailing Team Captain 2014
- Co-organizer of Down Under New York, a tech meetup for Aussies in NYC 2012-2014
- UNSW CSE Student Network Mentor, Orientation Camp leader.
- Tutor at National Computer Science School, University of Sydney, 2008 & 2009
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