About
Staff-level backend engineer with 11 years of experience designing distributed systems, leading platform reliability initiatives, and scaling critical infrastructure. Focused on building resilient, observable systems that serve millions of users. Passionate about mentoring, incident response, and reducing complexity through thoughtful architecture.
Experience
Staff Backend Engineer Vantix · Portland, OR 2021 – present
  • Led re-architecture of core event-ingestion pipeline, improving throughput 4× (to 2.3M events/sec) while reducing p99 latency from 340ms to 95ms.
  • Designed and implemented a multi-region Kubernetes deployment strategy with automated failover, achieving 99.995% uptime over 18 months.
  • Established service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for 12+ microservices; drove reduction in paging incidents by 60%.
  • Mentored 5 engineers through structured onboarding and code review, contributing to 3 internal promotions.
Senior Backend Engineer Cordium AI · San Francisco, CA 2018 – 2021
  • Architected a real-time model-serving platform using Rust and gRPC, reducing inference latency by 70% compared to previous Python-based system.
  • Built a distributed job scheduler on Kubernetes with backfill and priority queuing, handling 500k+ daily ML training tasks.
  • Reduced cloud costs by 32% ($2.1M annual) through right-sizing, spot instance adoption, and workload consolidation.
Backend Engineer PulseStream · Portland, OR 2015 – 2018
  • Developed a GraphQL API (Go) serving 50k req/s with <100ms p99, supporting the company's main mobile and web clients.
  • Designed a sharded PostgreSQL schema for time-series analytics, enabling interactive queries over 6 TB of data.
  • Implemented blue-green deployments and automated canary analysis, reducing deployment-related incidents by 80%.
Software Engineer TerraData Systems · Boulder, CO 2013 – 2015
  • Built RESTful microservices for environmental sensor data ingestion (Python/Flask), processing 10M+ readings daily.
  • Designed a fault-tolerant message queue layer using RabbitMQ, ensuring zero data loss during upstream outages.
Education
M.S. in Computer Science, University of Washington · 2013
Thesis: Low-latency consensus protocols for geo-distributed systems
B.S. in Computer Engineering, Oregon State University · 2011
Summa cum laude · Minor in Mathematics
Selected projects
Kronik · distributed benchmark orchestrator
Open-source tool for orchestrating multi-region latency and throughput benchmarks on Kubernetes. Supports pluggable workloads, automated report generation, and Prometheus metric export. 1,200+ GitHub stars.
Go, Kubernetes, gRPC, InfluxDB
Pail · structured log viewer for terminal
A fast, terminal-based log viewer with filtering, real-time tailing, and JSON/OTEL support. Written in Rust with zero runtime dependencies. Used internally at two organizations.
Rust, termion, serde
CircuitR · circuit-breaker library
Production-grade circuit-breaker for Go services with sliding-window metrics, half-open probes, and OpenTelemetry integration. Adopted by 3 teams at Vantix.
Go, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus
Awards & recognition
Vantix Engineering Excellence Award (2023) — for reliability improvements and incident response leadership.
Best Paper, USENIX OSDI (2020) — co-authored "Low-Latency Geo-Distributed Transactions Using Hybrid Logic Clocks."
Google Summer of Code Mentor (2019, 2022) — mentored contributors on distributed systems tooling.