Backend engineer with 15+ years building and operating scalable services in production. Sets technical direction through TDDs and architecture reviews, turns ambiguous product intent into durable backend design, and brings agentic engineering into day-to-day team practice.
Technical Skills#
Languages: Ruby, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL, Go
Backend and APIs: Rails, REST, GraphQL, Protobuf/gRPC, Node.js, Sidekiq
Infrastructure and Ops: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Datadog, Sentry, GitHub Actions, Statsig
Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, Databricks, PySpark, Airflow
Integrations: Auth0, Stripe, Iterable, AppsFlyer
Agentic engineering: Claude Code, Cursor, automated triage pipelines
Experience#
Scribd#
Senior Software Engineer | 2022-Present
Technical direction
- Led APIv2 performance improvement: ETag short-circuits, N+1 elimination, request-level caching, and serialization-path instrumentation that closed the measurement blind spot behind a p95 regression.
- Made the call, with Product, to trade recommendation volume for speed in the Home Load Time and recs-reduction experiments, targeting 15 to 30% p95 latency reductions.
- Shipped systematic Rails performance work: Owned technical direction for the Unloved Content Removal initiative as primary decision-maker across five teams, translating product intent into the TDD and driving an on-time launch through repeated scope shifts.
Platform and reliability
- Founding engineer on Scribd’s API gateway modernization: created the API schema repositories, designed GraphQL schemas and Protobuf/gRPC contracts for core entities, built resolvers against Core API, and set up CI/CD and schema-change inspection.
- Led incident response across production incidents including a site outage, audiobook progress resets, and cache degradation; drove many incident remediations end to end (server-side write guard, Databricks detection notebook, forced-update banners) and authored published RCAs, including the /home/v2 p95 regression postmortem.
- Stood up production infrastructure for a new Microfrontend service on AWS: ECS deployment, ECR, secrets management, Datadog dashboards and SLOs, and Sentry integration.
- Re-architected the Get-Book ETL pipeline and led PySpark migrations in Databricks, cutting critical feed errors from over 3,000 to 17.
Product collaboration and experimentation
- Built the reading-session pipeline to Iterable for lifecycle messaging: webhook endpoint, recency read-service, payload serializers, and a near-real-time session-start event worker.
- Partnered with Product on Day 0 activation experiments (Statsig, Stripe billing integration) and shipped the iHeartRadio sponsored row on Everand Home with partnerships stakeholders.
- Integrated with Fable: exposed signed Fable account-linking URLs through APIv2 for mobile account connection.
- Enhanced authentication flows on Auth0: GDPR-compliant account deletion, account unblocking, and signup/login fixes across web and mobile.
Team leadership and agentic engineering
- Drove agentic-engineering adoption (Claude Code, Cursor) as a founding member of the Code AI Champions working group; prototyped an automated Sentry-to-Jira-to-PR triage pipeline; advised Talent Acquisition on evaluating AI skills.
- Managed projects, ran technical interviews, and mentored engineers.
IBM / SoftLayer#
Technical Lead | 2014-2022
- Architected a data-migration ordering platform using React and Node.js.
- Built predictive storage-forecasting tools with Python and Jupyter.
Earlier Roles#
- Success Partners · Senior Software Engineer
- KEDARit · Software Architect
- McKesson · Programmer Analyst
- The Planet · Software Engineer
Education#
B.S. Computer Science State University of New York at Plattsburgh