Brooklyn, New York, United States
Security Engineer (i think that's my title?) at Zoom working on implementing assorted aspects (and designing future ones) of end-to-end encryption. Mostly servers and operations things. Zoom acquired the startup I was previously at, Keybase, in May 2020. I was a Software engineer at Keybase building products for end-users. Keybase is the only end-to-end encrypted platform with a truly multi-device approach to cryptographic identity. Products on top of this identity system include chat, file storage/sharing, and hierarchical team-management. I think it's a really impressive system, which is why I wanted to be here. Mostly wrote code in Golang and JavaScript, but have also done some outreach-y development in Python and Ruby (e.g. this chatbot framework https://github.com/keybase/pykeybasebot). Keybase is great. If you're not using it, you probably should be. Previously, I was the Director of Data & Engineering (after a bunch of promotions over 5 years) at Shopkeep. I led multiple teams (the largest was 7 engineers) across backend technologies and products: microservice API and database design, low-maintenance data pipelining, and monolithic web application development. Most of my time was spent in software and data architecture, team leadership, data analysis, and fullstack development. I really enjoyed helping engineers grow, building data infrastructure, retrospecting on my failures, and aligning technology tradeoffs with business ones. I was told that I'm a thoughtful manager and that I'm good at keeping large systems in my head. Both of these made me smile. likes: python3, golang, postgres, my sms-to-keybase chatbot loves: design patterns, refactoring, validation sets, strong types, columnar databases, bitcoin, my anonymous-email-inbox chatbot dislikes: untested code, python2, poorly considered interfaces
Mostly the same stuff but with a better title. A little more org-wide data governance, advocacy, decision-making, etc.
I started and led a team to build a combo data platform for (1) self-service internal reporting and (2) badass customer features. I saw a glaring need and a big opportunity. We use Python, Redshift, Snowplow, Looker, Scikit et al., and a little Spark. I also picked up another team (half in NYC and half in Belfast) to rebuild the backend of customer facing reports for better scalability: a few Python services, AWS SQS and then later Kafka, ElasticSearch. This project was super high visibility and priority in the org with fairly aggressive deadlines.
I led a team of 5 to 7 ruby/javascript engineers for a product-driven, agile team. This was mostly in NYC but at times partly in Belfast, NI.
Co-founded this venture with an old friend; public discourse for the internet age