# Evan Niessen-Derry

> With over a decade of experience, I turn complex problems into simple, robust solutions.

Location: St Paul, Minnesota, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/evanniessenderry

Driven by a compassionate curiosity, I strive to get to the heart of any problem I'm faced with. I've found that team work beats tech stack any day of the week, and I'm looking for empathic and curious people to solve hard problems with.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Comcast
Jan 2024 – Jan 2024
• Lead high-visibility, business critical project to success in the face of sudden, 11th hour timeline acceleration.
• Accelerated org velocity by several orders of magnitude by reducing complexity of multi-language (ClojureScript, Javascript, Typescript), multi-framework (Re-Frame, Reagent, React, MUI) codebase
• Ensured cross-functional, cross-continental stakeholder alignment through regular written and face-to-face communication
• Decoupled Dev, QA, and Product workstreams by adapting existing legacy codebase to support continuous integration/deployment

### Senior Software Engineer @ Shortcut
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023
• Lead architecture and development of two-way syncing feature with Jira from
conception to release
• Designed and extended existing Datomic schema to to support two-way sync
project
• Reduced existential project risk for Jira Sync by bringing clarity to discussions
with key stakeholders around scope, goals, and timeline for initial release
• Saved hundreds of hours of engineering time by cutting CI/CD pipeline run
time in half

### Lead Data Engineer @ Analytical Flavor Systems Inc.
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021
• Debugged and resolved mission critical failure of core ML feature generation
Kubernetes cluster running in GCP
• Cut business critical ML feature generation time in half
• Reduced organizational risk by aligning our ML feature generation cloud
infrastructure with our organizational capacity and constraints
• Leveraged Clojure, Docker, and Terraform to enable this re-architecture
• Lead Data Engineering and Data Science teams in pivoting focus to automate
creation of our core product deliverables in response to existential threats
to the company

### Senior Software Engineer @ Healthfinch by Health Catalyst
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021
• Adapted multilingual — Clojure, React, RoR — microservices architecture
to meet shifting business needs
• Triaged and fixed issues spanning entire microservices architecture,
crossing language, hardware, and deployment boundaries in the AWS cloud
• Resolved go-live blocker for a major customer by debugging their network live
with them on the phone, building customer goodwill in the face of a politically
thorny problem
• Increased platform performance and stability through implementation of
distributed tracing
• Lead and shipped major project for key customer — adding missing
capabilities to our decision support engine — which spanned multiple
systems and involved multiple engineers and non-engineering stakeholders
• Enabled faster and stronger change validation of core Clojure rules engine
by creating a system to run new code safely against production data during
development, resulting in strong regression-testing assurances
• Reduced product development friction by creating no-downtime SDLC
roadmaps for key projects

### Director Of Infrastructure @ Kidblog Inc.
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019
• Managed entire cloud infrastructure, including multi-node Elasticsearch cluster
• Shipped reporting feature, providing customers on-demand insights into
platform value, that increased sales and customer success velocity
• Increased product sales through design and delivery of referral program
feature, refactoring and building on existing Clojure codebase
• Shipped promo code management feature, increasing marketing velocity,
designing/developing the API endpoints, ES mappings, and backend Clojure
code
• Adapted existing frontend coffeescript/angular code to support new promo code
feature

### Technical Support Engineer @ Code42
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Minneapolis, MN

### President @ Future Proof Consulting, Inc.
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016

### Undergrad Research Assistant/System Administrator @ UMN CSEIT Systems Staff
Jan 2011 – Jan 2015

### Software Engineer @ Open Systems International
Jan 2010 – Jan 2011
I worked in the Internal Tools team, enhancing the auto-compiler. Using HTCondor to orchestrate the builds across our supported platforms, and tying in rudimentary regression testing and build verification, I got salaried developers from having to baby-sit each and every build, to simply processing incoming build requests, starting the builds with the click of a button, and then handling the results once the build is complete.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science
University of Minnesota
Jan 2011 – Jan 2015


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/evan-niessen-derry

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Source: https://flows.cv/evanniessenderry
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/evanniessenderry/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22