I am looking for a role that I can dive into and make meaningful contributions to further the team’s mission. When the path is clear I can be a force multiplier; in the face of ambiguity I can set a course. I’ll do the hard work, the boring work. And I’ll support focus, so that we work on the right thing at the right time.
Experience
Lumos Labs - Engineering Director
10/2020 - Present
- Partnered with Product to define and execute strategy across 3 verticals: Consumer, Research, and Medical.
- Redefined the remit and structure of several teams (data engineering, backend development, web development, Corp IT) to help them deliver on our mission.
- Reshaped our interview process to be more humane by shortening the duration of interview schedules, providing candidates with advanced notice of content, and clarifying role expectations. As a result, we hit our hiring goals during a very hot talent market in 2022.
- Created and staffed a Security Engineering role to fill a critical gap in the operation of our products.
Jeli, Inc. - Co-founder and CTO
8/2019 - 9/2020
- Laid the technical foundation for cloud-first development of a product that aids teams learning from software outages/incidents. Combined 12-factor application principles, containerized workloads, and AWS services like ECS in a strategy to minimize operational overhead and focus on delivering valuable features.
- Established an early security and compliance program to position the company for a SOC 2 Type 2 attestation that would appeal to early customers.
Bloomberg, L.P. - Senior Software Engineer
3/2017 - 8/2019
- Managed projects, provided architectural guidance, and engineering expertise to develop a storage automation project that reduced a request backlog from 1 week to 1 day and eliminated a $1M service contract.
- Designed and implemented a CI platform supporting 4 operating systems, configuration management solutions (Chef, Salt) and multiple projects written in Python, Ruby, and Go. After onboarding 100 repos in 3 months, engineers and management were more confident in their updates, detecting common/recurring bugs, and following consistent testing practices.
Etsy, Inc. - Staff Operations Engineer
1/2013 - 3/2017
- Partnered with product teams to help them focus operational effort in support of their work including preparing feature launches and honing reliability practices. By describing a minimum set of required outcomes and training to realize them, I provided a clear roadmap to teams that enabled them to consistently deliver reliable features.
- Led architecture reviews, operational readiness efforts, and facilitated incident debriefings to drive an holistic approach to systems thinking and continuous learning.
- Contributed open source tooling in the monitoring space and encouraged the industry to think differently about alert design and the on-call experience.
Conifer Health Solutions - Technical Services Director (Previously InforMed, LLC)
1/2004 - 1/2013
- Established and grew a Systems Engineering team to support the long-term technical needs of the clinician, customer service, and claims administration departments. We built and implemented low-friction solutions that supported the mission of providing high-quality care at reduced costs.
- Built a Support Desk team, setting service levels for response time and quality, to provide regular assistance to clinicians spread across the country.
Ebix Health - Senior System Administrator
10/1998 - 1/2004
- Provided post-sales engineering design, implementation, and support to customers including managing onsite customer installations across a range of platforms.
Miscellany
Conference Presentations
I am fascinated by the prospect of people using computers to augment their activities during incidents. I’ve given several presentations on tooling I’ve built to support on-call engineers, alert design, and how we might apply concepts from Cognitive Systems Engineering to improve the state of the art.
- Designing Alerts to Direct Attention describes Cognitive Systems Engineering concepts and their application in designing alerts.
- It’s 3AM, Do You Know Why You Got Paged? dives into alert design and ways we can aid on-call engineers’ ability to orient themselves. I introduce nagios-herald and illustrate how it applies these ideas.
- In Mean Time to Sleep, a colleague and I discuss quantifying the on-call experience and tooling we’ve built to aid engineers.
Blog Posts
I write occasionally. These are some samples of my posts.
- Incident Analysis and Chaos Engineering: Complementary Practices
- Remote Incident Response
- When Does an Investigation End?
- I’ve also collected thoughts on software engineering that I ocassionally update.
Open Source Software
I’ve open-sourced a few tools I hoped might be useful to others.
nagios-heraldis a project that supports adding context to alerts to help orient on-call engineers.chef-umamiprovides a low-friction way to get started writing tests for Chef cookbooks by doing it for you!