Ryan Peterman

↓ building the podcast and keyboard I wish existed

San Francisco, California, United States

About

I quit the best job I ever had to try and build what I wish existed in the world. Two projects I'm working on now: 1. The Peterman Pod - When I first started at Meta, the career stories of incredible engineers always inspired me. I aim to share transparent career stories that I wish I had more of back in the day: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/peterman-pod There are still many engineers who are heros to me that I'd love to bring on the show one day! 2. Compose - I could never really find what I wanted so I'm building the ergonomic keyboard I wish existed. Pictures of our prototype here: https://read.compose.llc/p/our-keyboard-design-reveal I've earmarked ~6 months of living expenses to fund this new career direction. I'm going to give it my all to see if it's sustainable. Thank you for your support, working on my passion projects is something I’m only lucky enough to consider because of you all 🙏 If you're just curious to follow along generally, I'll share occasional updates everytime I have something interesting to share here: https://www.developing.dev/

Experience

  • Host at The Peterman Pod
    2026 - Present · 7 mos

  • Engineering & Product at Compose
    2026 - Present · 7 mos

  • Engineering, AI/ML Training Infrastructure at Meta
    2024 - 2026 · 2 yrs

    Worked on making distributed GPU-based training more efficient and addressing novel bottlenecks at unprecedented scale.

  • Instagram (6 yrs 3 mos)
    • Staff Software Engineer, Media Infrastructure
      Dec 2021 - Jun 2024 · 2 yrs 7 mos

      • Landed the largest single efficiency win at the company that half and wrote publicly about the optimization (https://engineering.fb.com/2022/11/04/video-engineering/instagram-video-processing-encoding-reduction/) • Won a company-wide award for efficiency work that Mark Zuckerberg recognized publicly (IG - https://www.instagram.com/p/CkihQRtO5yO/, FB - https://www.facebook.com/4/videos/884058129426425/)

    • Senior Software Engineer, Media Infrastructure
      Dec 2020 - Dec 2021 · 1 yr 1 mo

      • Incepted and led video ads pipeline rewrite (5 eng involved) that reduced memory errors by 98%, drove +3.9% ads watch time wins, and exceeded cross-org revenue goals • Wrote about the optimization publicly here - https://about.instagram.com/blog/engineering/making-instagram-video-ads-performant

    • Software Engineer II, Media Infrastructure
      Jun 2019 - Dec 2020 · 1 yr 7 mos

      • Cut send latency in half for Instagram media messages as backend tech lead for a workstream of 5 engineers • Wrote a technical blog post detailing the biggest win here: https://about.instagram.com/blog/engineering/cutting-threads-send-latency-in-half • Found and fixed bug in cache breaking hash function which reduced cache fill from origin data centers by 50%

  • Software Engineer I at Amazon Lab126
    Sep 2017 - Apr 2018 · 8 mos