# Joe Schafer

> Building for craft breweries

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/joeschafer

I enjoy building speedy, delightful products and professional teams.  Paratrooper turned programmer.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Canals
Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area

### Principal Engineer @ Arryved
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area
Led the integration of SimpleCircle's ERP with Arryved's POS post-acquisition.

### Co-Founder & CTO @ SimpleCircle
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area
Acquired by Arryved. Branded as Arryved Brewery Management.
Founded and led SimpleCircle, a radically simple ERP for craft breweries that unifies inventory, production, sales, and order fulfillment.

### Software Engineer @ Heap
Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area
Managed the reliability and optimization of a 1.4 petabyte database cluster consisting of 100 sharded Postgres databases unified by Citus, a distributed query engine. Optimized all parts of the data pipeline and serving stack including Kafka data ingestion, Linux kernel tuning, Postgres configuration, and SQL code generation.

Designed and implemented a control plane in Go with a REST API to automate database recovery, backups, and upgrades. Reduced manual work from 4 hours to 10 minutes and database recovery time from 2 days to 8 hours.

Led 3 month technical evaluation of commercial database vendors to investigate feasibility of a database migration to a distributed column store. Implemented, benchmarked, and evaluated Heap’s workload on SingleStore, Postgres, Snowflake, dbX, and Rockset.

### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | Mountain View, CA
Led a team of 3 software engineers building the backend for an internal Platform-as-a-Service similar to Heroku.  The platform supported $2B in revenue and served 100k users. Designed and implemented a distributed, permission-aware index for all objects on the platform using Spanner, Bigtable, and Zanzibar.

### Infantry Officer @ US Army
Jan 2010 – Jan 2016 | 82nd Airborne Division
Led 25 combat missions over 3,000 miles in Afghanistan through ambushes and IEDs. Coached and mentored 45 lieutenants on Infantry tactics culminating with platoon live-fire exercises.


## Education
### B.S. in Computer Science
United States Military Academy at West Point

### Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Business
Stanford University Graduate School of Business


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jschaf
- Portfolio: https://joe.schafer.dev
- GitHub: https://github.com/jschaf

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Source: https://flows.cv/joeschafer
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/joeschafer/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-10