I am serving as the Technical Architect & Staff Engineer for the Qualtrics Strategy & Research Product Engineering Unit. Our group comprises of 8 development teams with a total of 60 engineers that operate 50+ microservices supporting a +$300M ARR business with +90k daily active users. I advise teams in key functions such as weekly operational reviews & design reviews.

Some of my notable contributions as an IC in this role:

=> Discovered a 0-day vulnerability within a recently launched product during a design review that allowed unauthorized access to customer data. I led a 10-day code yellow to identify and fix 12 production APIs; Then recommended process improvements to the company-wide Secure Development Standard practices during the Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

=> I delivered a self-funded operational “scorecard” dashboard for all 8 teams in my Product Unit rolling up critical engineering metrics specific to each team’ services and ops posture. This was used to set KPIs, clearly identify SLA breaches and hold teams and managers accountable to a high bar for operational excellence.

=> I led a re-architecture of a legacy system that processes 4.5 million jobs a month. We switched the internal job queue from a custom Redis implementation to an Apache Kafka instance and moved the compute infrastructure to Kubernetes with Keda autoscaling. The Improvements are expected to lower costs by ~$100k/year.

=> I defined product requirements, designed, and led development of a new AI Agent feature during a company hackathon. Leveraging Anthropic’s Claude and Semantic Search Engine built on Hugging Face BGE-M3 Embeddings and AWS OpenSearch. Uses Temporal.io for Agent orchestration. Deployed using Gitlab CI & Kubernetes

=> Presented a yearly technical presentation of the systems owned by my team 3 years in a row to orient new engineers to the project within and outside of the team. Delivered 23 technical presentations to multi-disciplinary audiences over the last 2 years

In this role, I directly managed 6 engineers, and served as a technical architecture lead for an additional 4 engineers. My team built and maintained 2 unique product lines over the course of 1 year. The first was a product that I designed and built myself as the Tech Lead and then Team Lead. In the second, I served as an architect. Together, we built a Semantic Search Engine from scratch with a team of 5 engineers on AWS OpenSearch (which is a managed ElasticSearch & ELK stack) and a BERT embedding model trained on an MSMarco dataset. We brought this product to market as a limited beta preview while I was in the role.

I was awarded a top 10th percentile Manager Effectiveness score in quarterly Anonymous Employee Experience feedback surveys for 3 of 4 quarters of my tenure. I had the pleasure of mentoring a diverse engineering team with varying skills, backgrounds and identities. I even served as a formal mentor for 2 additional engineers from underrepresented groups from other teams, and remained open to advising others informally across the company. I advocated for and successfully guided 2 engineers in my direct team through the promotion process as their manager. With each team member I collaborated with them in weekly meetings to develop a career plan to coach them towards the next stage in their individual career goals.

A few representative contributions made in this role:

I co-designed and built a change-data-capture (CDC) pipeline supporting processing of the largest datasets at Qualtrics (+50MM records). The pipeline would use a serverless compute framework run on OpenWhisk and triggered by Kafka events to process hundreds of thousands of survey response records into datasets that powered advanced visualization in Brand Experience Research. This tech powered a new $14M ARR / $1.4B TAM business, scaling from 0 to first 100 clients.

During a period of rapidly increasing scale within the pipeline, I implemented performance improvements using caching. When deployed to production, these improvements consistently reduced TP90 queue lag from 30 days down to just 5 mins. This made the product much more stable during periods of high traffic or degraded availability scenarios and created trust as this product first launched.

Prior to this, I designed and implemented the first B2C product offering at Qualtrics, intended to bring ~$1M in annual savings through a direct-to-consumer model for hiring survey respondents. Meant as an automation for low-margin sales of survey panels, the software integrated with Stripe and built an end-to-end working card payment system.

Prior to this, I designed and implemented a Role-Based-Access-Control (RBAC) authorization model for a new product offering in Brand Experience Research. This involved defining user personas and access patterns related to the offering and modeling these within a brand new access control system being released by the platform engineering team. Since no one had built something like this successfully before, the project was used as a reference architecture for future implementations by the AuthZ platform team when they onboarded new use cases.

At Qualtrics, I owned and developed a replicated, distributed RESTful URL-shortening service. In implementing the service, I integrated with several core Qualtrics products, and touched 8 different codebases. In the process of development, I worked with several technologies, including Golang, Docker, and Jenkins, Heira and Puppet. I created my own CI workflow and built the project into a production-ready service by the end of my 12 week internship. The service outperformed current throughput requirements more than 24 times.