Nicholas Harder

Software Engineer @ Headway | Ex-AWS

New York City Metropolitan Area

About

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineer at Headway
    Jan 2025 - Present · 1 yr 6 mos

  • Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Apr 2022 - Jan 2025 · 2 yrs 10 mos

    Built an on-host L4 packet proxy in Rust for private VPC to VPC networking - Encapsulates packets in internal protocol after intercepting them behind a TUN virtual device - Drove decision amongst stakeholders to prioritize non-functional requirements prior to launch, such as: error handling, exception safety, observability (metrics, logging, alarms, dashboards), and operator training Led availability initiative resulting in improved MTTR and fewer customer escalations - Identified inability to improve availability stemmed from observability misses - Distributed work across 4 engineers to deliver improvements within a quarter - Trained operators on how the depths of VPC Link requests and how to use new tooling for events Reduced EC2 spend by $19m YOY through down scaling initiative - Identified opportunity for innovation and cost savings when prompted to use archaic spreadsheet mechanism - Pioneered traffic/capacity forecasting to ensure fleet capacity upheld our availability SLA post scale down Built core sidecar for zonal shift capability (evacuate traffic from a bad Availability Zone) - Deployed to 100k+ EC2 instances and used 10+ times without a single incident after more than a year

  • Circulo Health (Full-time · 1 yr 3 mos)
    • Senior Software Engineer
      Dec 2021 - Apr 2022 · 5 mos

    • Software Engineer
      Feb 2021 - Dec 2021 · 11 mos

      Led development of the first product in our customers hands - Pivoted from multiple long term, unproven initiatives to focus on requirements given a 90 day deadline - Collaborated with potential customers, CEO, health experts, and product managers to define the product Planned, executed, and oversaw use of AWS services to ensure /(scalab|availab|ag|observab)ility/ - API Gateway (HTTP & REST), Lambda, Route53, DynamoDB & RDS, SQS, Cognito, Transit Gateway, VPC, Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail, IAM, SES, Step Functions, X Ray, EC2 - Provided technical advice to multiple teams on these services - Automated deployments with Terraform and Gitlab CI/CD

  • Co-Founder at Abstra
    Mar 2019 - Dec 2021 · 2 yrs 10 mos

    We write software ranging from websites to full web and mobile applications that automate business processes and operations. Our software provides several points of value to our customers: streamlining and standardizing their processes, providing full control, access, and analytics of every relevant data point, and unleashing their growth potential. - Customers lack the necessary experience to describe their software and logistical needs. - We open up their perspective on what is possible. - We take these perplexing concepts and turn them into reality.

  • Laboratory Research Assistant at Self employed
    Aug 2018 - Mar 2019 · 8 mos

    - Built Python modules that integrate with the industry sponsor’s (SYSWELD) software - Automatically generate simplified bead weld models - Wrote algorithms to calculate the hardness of a material after simulation of welding - Utilize data from a master’s thesis to create useful unit and integration tests