# Adam Markowitz > Staff Software Engineer at Google Location: Soquel, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/adammarkowitz - Senior software architect and engineer with 20+ years experience - Excellent at communication, organization, transparency, team leadership and predictability - Proven ability to build high performance teams and lead innovation - Full Stack Open Source Software Engineer - A performance centric focus on scalable, high performance, low latency systems - Awarded Manager of the Year at a larger (300+ employees), well funded startup in the SEO and SEM space - Demonstrated record of high performance standards, including attention to schedules, deadlines, budgets, and quality work SPECIALTIES AND EXPERIENCE - Software design and implementation of high performance, scalable systems - Languages: Kotlin, Ruby/JRuby, Javascript, Java, SQL, LookML, (Past: x86 ASM, Delphi, C, C++, C#, Python, HTML, CSS, more...) - Experience with: React, React-Native, node, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Google Protocol Buffers, Zookeeper, Memcached, SQLite, Nginx, HAProxy, Munin, Solr, Twitter Bootstrap, Coffeescript, more... - Source code repositories: git, (Past: svn, cvs, more...) - Build systems: gradle, maven (Past: ant, make, more...) - Continuous Integration: Jenkins, TravisCI - Cloud Services: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud - Profiling and Performance tuning - Capacity planning - SEO PASSIONS - High performance scalable systems - Language Design and Implementation - API/Framework Design and Implementation - Emerging technologies - Open Source Software - Martial Arts - Flamenco Guitar ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Google Jan 2019 – Present ### Staff Software Engineer, Lead @ Looker Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Santa Cruz, CA, USA - Technical Lead for an agile, small team focusing on a suite of critical internal product and business services ### Senior Software Engineer @ Looker Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Santa Cruz, CA Main areas of product focus are performance and quality Looker product contributions: - High quality code reviews for peers, including software engineers, senior software engineers and principal software engineers - High number of performance improvements in various parts of the product, some of which resulted in an order of magnitude or better improvement - Significantly reduce memory overhead when writing/reading from the cache by implementing streaming in to/from the cache - Reduce memory consumption in various parts of the product, some of which resulted in over an order of magnitude or better improvement. Significant reduction in outages as well as smoother operation reported as direct results from these changes - Performance, architectural, clustering and threading improvements in many areas of the product - Improved encryption and secure storage of sensitive data within the Looker product - Increased cache hit rates for various entity types by up to 50% - Increased cache retrieval performance for many entity types by over 2x - Improved test suite performance and reduce build times (close to 50%) - CDN Integration (AWS CouldFront) - Implement SubResource Integrity (SRI) for securely loading front end assets (such as .js) - Hundreds of bugs resolved - High value code reviews for peers - fixes in various SQL dialects - fixes and updates to LookML modeling language ### CTO @ Zenti, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto, CA Software Stack: AWS, Kafka, Zookeeper, Java, Hadoop, Ruby, MySQL, Redis, Salt ### Architect @ Zenti, Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Palo Alto, CA Responsible for algorithm Research & Development in the Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) space as well as architectural design, guidance and implementation of a near-realtime stream processing system for big data. - Improved performance (throughput) of binary classification by over 300% - Stabilized accuracy of binary classification - Implemented k-fold partitioning to automate testing of classification accuracy using root mean squared error (RMSE) - Created internal tools to improve visibility for trainers on accuracy of classifiers as well as monitor operations of the existing system - Architecting, Designing and Implementing a new system to resolve long standing issues in the current system such as maintainability, scalability, performance, failover and quality. - Documented core algorithms and infrastructure that were previously undocumented and difficult to maintain Software Stack: AWS, Kafka, Zookeeper, Java, Hadoop, Ruby, MySQL, Redis, Salt ### Founder, President and CTO @ Filmling Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Santa Cruz, CA Software Stack: AWS, node.js, nginx, Redis, Postgres ### Technical Advisor @ Multiple Startups Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 Providing technical guidance and assistance to multiple startups in various stages of funding. Current technologies in eco-systems include, but not limited to: Redis, Ruby/Rails, C#, SQLite, iPhone/iPad apps, Python, PostgreSQL, memcached, Solr, HAProxy, Nginx, MySQL, Amazon EC2/S3/Glacier/Cloudwatch, more... Investigating Hadoop, Storm, Spark, NodeJS and other technologies for solution viability with existing systems. ### Vice President of Engineering @ Reply.com Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | San Ramon, CA Successfully led the engineering team to re-architect and re-implement the consumer facing portion of merchantcircle.com, a high traffic business listing website, hitting required targets for an extremely aggressive schedule. - Existing site with high SEO page rank, kept parity - 300MM+ indexed pages - 250+ templates rewritten - Organic Search Engine traffic rose over 40+% as a direct result of the new implementation - Page performance improvements of 80+% (8sec document complete down to < 2sec document complete) - reduce hardware infrastructure for existing services - build out additional hardware infrastructure for improved failover and new services Individual responsibilities included interviewing prospective engineers, training new and existing engineers on current/new technology, working closely with IT/OPs as well as Product/Business Development. A strict focus on traceability, visibility and predictability on the project using Scrum and Agile software development processes. Personal re-architecture contributions included simplifying existing software infrastructure with an emphasis on performance and maintainability (entailed rewriting all templates, moved all javascript to async and more), implementing a custom caching framework on top of memcached, expansion of multiple machine clusters (memcached, Solr, appservers and more), reducing hardware requirements and improving page response and load times by over 80%, all while improving SEO and keeping backwards compatibility. Open Source Software consisting of, but not limited to: Python, HAProxy, Solr, PostgreSQL, Memcached, OpenStreetMap/MapQuest Open API, Linux (CentOS/Ubuntu), Redis, CouchDB, Cassandra. ### Director of Engineering @ Reply.com Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Ramon, CA Provide senior technical leadership, expertise, training and coaching to the entire R&D team for one of the largest social networks for small businesses, www.merchantcircle.com. Architecture is mainly Open Source Software consisting of, but not limited to, Python, HAProxy, Redis, Cassandra, Postgres, CouchDB, Memcached, Solr. Responsible for the delivery of complex data-related and UI/UX projects/programs as well as research and guidance related to next generation web and mobile applications and architecture. Manage and coordinate a multitude of interrelated activities within the constraints of limited resources and changing priorities. ### Senior Technical Lead @ Reply.com Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Mountain View, CA Lead a team of engineers on one of the largest social network for small businesses, www.merchantcircle.com. Tasks include project management, technical advisory on new features, internal framework/architecture maintenance and updates and performance tuning. Architecture focuses on an OSS stack of Python, PostgreSQL, memcached, CherryPy, Solr, Redis, Cassandara, HAProxy and lighttpd. ### CEO @ Aire Software LLC Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Santa Cruz, CA Founded the company and grew it to include a total of 7 developers and graphics designers. Management, Sales, Project Manager and Custom software development specializing in Website Design, WordPress, Drupal, Microsoft .NET, ASP.NET, jQuery, HTML 5, javascript, CSS, PHP, Python, SQL and Embarcadero Delphi. ### Software Architect @ Falafel Software Inc. Jan 2006 – Jan 2009 Senior Consultant focusing on framework architectures for front and back end systems, focusing primarily on the Microsoft Technology Stack and General Web Technologies including ASP.NET [AJAX], javascript/JSON/jQuery, C#, MSSQL 2005/2008, CSS, and Visual Studio 2008/2010. ### Senior R&D Engineer @ CodeGear Corporation (nee Borland Software Corporation) Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 | Scotts Valley, CA As a senior member of the Research and Development staff I was a key member of the decision making body for new features as well as project/product planning. I regularly consulted with the Chief Scientist regarding new and innovative ideas in areas such as IDE code assistance, language design, framework architecture, performance testing/improvements and how to best integrate the product with new and emerging technologies. I was one of the sole developers and maintainers of nearly a dozen lexers and parsers, keeping them up to date with language changes and making sure they adhered to standard industry specs. The majority of my time was spent writing the front end for compilers, API framework design/implementation and performance analysis/improvement. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Borland Software Corporation Jan 1999 – Jan 2006 | Scotts Valley, CA As a senior member of the Research and Development staff I was a key member of the decision making body for new features as well as project/product planning. I regularly consulted with the Chief Scientist regarding new and innovative ideas in areas such as IDE code assistance, language design, framework architecture, performance testing/improvements and how to best integrate the product with new and emerging technologies. I was one of the sole developers and maintainers of nearly a dozen lexers and parsers, keeping them up to date with language changes and making sure they adhered to standard industry specs. The majority of my time was spent writing the front end for compilers, API framework design/implementation and performance analysis/improvement. ### Developer Support Engineer @ Borland Software Corporation Jan 1996 – Jan 1999 | Scotts Valley, CA Assisted customers with programming and design issues over the phone and via email. Excelled at customer satisfaction and soft skills. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science in Computer Science University of California, Santa Cruz ### Computer Science and Music Cabrillo College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/markowitz - Portfolio: http://www.adammarkowitz.com - Portfolio: http://stackoverflow.com/users/102402/adam-markowitz?tab=answers&sort=votes --- Source: https://flows.cv/adammarkowitz JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/adammarkowitz/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12