Building the fab

I joined Coinbase to work on key management systems.

I designed, built, and operated k2, the next generation of Coinbase’s hot wallet. At its peak k2 was generating >99.99% of all cryptographic signatures originating from Coinbase. As team lead for this project I was directing the efforts of 3-6 engineers over a two year period.

I spent significant time working on Coinbase’s cold storage systems, acting as lead developer for a 6 month period. These systems ultimately secure the majority funds stored at Coinbase. In this role I supported new business requirements such as improving transaction speed, supporting new cryptocurrencies, and helping with the design of reusable cold keys.

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER (April 2013 - March 2014)

I was an early member of the Realtime team, working furiously to scale Uber’s second-generation dispatch system to keep pace with the tremendous growth we were seeing. During these early days I’d work on anything and everything that came my way. Some examples:

• Implemented and ran ncar, a service for quickly finding nearby dispatch candidates.

• Designed and implemented the first datacenter failover mechanism. I would be the first person called at 3a.m. when we actually had to use it.

• Was responsible for the connection node, which performed load balancing and city-sharding for all incoming messages.

ENGINEERING MANAGER (April 2014 - January 2016)

This was my first experience in management. Starting with two direct reports, the team would grow to over 30 in 18 months.

I managed the Realtime Platform Services team. We were responsible for a collection of services that is now known as legacy dispatch. We engineered scaling and reliability for a system that was inherently neither scalable nor reliable. We kept this system running for several years, through several orders of magnitude growth and well beyond its expiration date. It was eventually decommissioned and replaced with the current dispatch system.

I also managed an infra team that built the first iterations of tchannel, an in-house RPC framework.

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER II (February 2016 - December 2017)

With legacy dispatch retied, I joined uberEATS as an IC. UberEATS was experiencing similar growth to the rides business a few years ago. Here I worked on various projects related to reliability, metrics, alerting, etc. I also built and supported deputy, a dev tool that routes production messages to development machines for debugging and testing.

• Developed and maintained low-latency C++ order management systems for equities and derivatives trading deployed in 10 APAC markets

• Developed a high-availability solution shared across several teams

• Improved message throughput by a factor of 10

• Migrated ~30 application instances on Solaris to ~15 instances on Linux

• Taught English and promoted international exchange in junior high schools and elementary schools in rural Japan