# Claire Gaestel > Senior Software Engineer Location: Seattle, Washington, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/clairegaestel ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Pulumi Jan 2024 – Present ### Senior Software Engineer @ Turntide Technologies Jan 2018 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Designed and built a two-way synchronized device “shadow” mechanism that enabled reliable configuration management of devices in the face of intermittent network connectivity. - Essentially this was a CRDT with automatic conflict resolution which enabled a simplified offline-first programming model against replicated state and reduced the effort required to build features that bridged cloud and edge. I used this to drive one-click firmware updates. Migrated all of our manually provisioned infrastructure to be fully driven by IAC using Pulumi. - Solely in charge of a cloud-to-cloud migration from unmanaged kOps Kubernetes on AWS to managed AKS clusters on Azure. Clusters were migrated with no downtime, hooray! Built Kafka stateful stream processors for driving motor fault detection and alerting features, and created a reusable abstraction for performing windowing operations over event streams. Introduced GraphQL API gateway to provide a unified view over gRPC microservices and other data sources to the frontend. - Promoted Relay-style fragment driven UI on top of Apollo to facilitate composing remote-data driven React components Supported a React Native mobile app for commissioning motor controllers - Enabled fetching & caching of firmware artifacts, avoiding the necessity of new app store releases, and simplified modbus communication subsystem which dramatically increased reliability of motor firmware updates Became a build system enthusiast - Set up fully hermetic toolchains for Bazel in Go, Typescript, Python and a C++ cross-compiler for ARM builds of firmware. - Provided automatic self-contained database setup & teardown for integration tests, eliminating manual environment setup. - Implemented remote build artifact caching which decreased worst case CI runtimes from upwards of an hour to under ten minutes, with around ~30s being the common case. - Added gazelle support for custom protobuf plugins, eliminating BUILD file maintenance. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Shippo Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 * Implementation of rate limits, including the introduction of a new sidecar component, Envoy, and multi-container deployment * Managed the OAuth project successfully to completion on schedule and designed and implemented backend functionality * Implemented self-serve branded tracking pages * Built the frontend of Shippo's first online customer reports * Led Elasticsearch improvements and upgraded Elasticsearch on all environments, including production, to 2.4 * Tuned, performance-tested, and rolled out database connection pooling across all clusters * Served on the on-call rotation and assisted with other on-call rotations, root causing and resolving incidents in real time ### Senior Software Engineer @ Joyus, Inc. Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Full stack Java / Javascript engineer :) - Integrated several third party platforms including an external ERP system, and warehouse fulfillment operations - Paired up for complete overhaul of website under very tight time constraints - Automated management of internal support tickets which saved developer hours - Integrated a reviews platform with the eCommerce site and launched successful promo campaign to encourage swift adoption - Proposed and implemented new frontend technology stack using React, Graphql, and Relay. Supported the engineering team with learning the myriad new technologies introduced by this project and provided standards to follow. Introduced new tooling and developer experience: hot reloading of compiled javascript, scoped css-modules that prevent accidental style collisions, and styleguidist which enables the development of components in isolation and to serve as a living style guide. - Enabled server side rendering of the new React product page to preserve SEO by using the Java Nashorn Javascript engine. This allowed deploying the new page on our existing backend codebase without requiring new supporting infrastructure. - Introduced a new GraphQL web API layer, the first external product/video catalog api. Added integration with React Relay which allows components to declare data dependencies such that the required data to load a page is automatically determined based on the components used. This allowed product changes that alter data requirements to be significantly easier to implement simply by updating the declared data dependencies, and eliminates the need to alter intermediate plumbing. ### Network Manager @ Berkeley Student Cooperative Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 Administer and Manage a Network for a 65 member Co-op. ### Webmaster @ Berkeley Student Cooperative Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 Maintaining website for organization and deploying new applications. ### Computer Support Technician @ Miller Institute Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ### Web Application Developer @ Boalt School of Law Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 Designed and implemented web applications with other members of the design and web application team. ### Space Grant Intern @ Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 Designed tests to verify that all functionality of the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) Flight Software Module aboard the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission performed according to specification. ### Computer Science Research Assistant @ UCB Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 Helped to develop a High School AP course, worked on java exercises, self-tests, and lessons. ### Contract server-side programmer for iPhone application @ Independent Contractor Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 • MySQL database design • Wrote scripts to capture regional advertising data for redisplay to users by location ### Technology tutor in C and C++ @ Independent School Tutoring Jan 2000 – Jan 2009 Taught fundamental programming concepts to students ## Education ### BA in Computer Science University of California, Berkeley Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 ### Pasadena City College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/claire-gaestel-01420046 --- Source: https://flows.cv/clairegaestel JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/clairegaestel/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22