# Jonathan Swartz > Staff Software Engineer Location: Berkeley, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/jonathanswartz 25 years professional experience as a software engineer, manager and instructor. 12 years at Amazon.com and subsididaries (Goodreads). My most recent coding has been in Ruby/Rails (14 years), but I have used a variety of languages in the past (Perl, C/C++, Javascript, Python). I prefer expressive languages like Ruby and Python for rapid development, extending to lower-level languages as needed for performance. Creator of Mason (http://www.masonhq.com/), an open-source Perl based web development system used by thousands of web sites including Amazon.com; and CHI (https://metacpan.org/module/CHI), a unified caching framework for Perl. Specialties: Software architecture, web engineering, rapid application development, devops. Ruby, Linux, MySQL/Postgres, Redis, Memcached, AWS. ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer @ Instacart Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States Core developer on Ruby backend platform used by hundreds of engineers. I focus on developer productivity, build/test speed, and expanding type checking with Sorbet. Other projects: * Set up a monitoring framework/standards for multiple teams using Datadog and Terraform. Facilitated creation of hundreds of monitors with standardized tags, notifications and priority levels. * Overhauled a data pipeline system syncing user data to Braze (CRM system) from dozens of data sources. Decreased Snowflake costs by a factor of 10, decreased sync time by 40%, and increased data attribute count by a factor of 4. * Ran the RCA (root cause analysis) process for the customer app ### Senior Software Engineer @ Goodreads.com Jan 2012 – Jan 2021 Goodreads, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, is the world's largest site for readers and book recommendations. Some of the projects I've worked on as the tech lead on the Goodreads Foundation team: * Architected a new cloud-based development environment for engineers to replace on-laptop development, thus improving consistency and performance * Developed a nightly production snapshot containing a coherent subset of production data from 100+ tables and services, for realistic development and staging environments * Developed a remote parallel smoke-testing cluster, reducing full test run times from >1 hour to 12 minutes and freeing development environments for other tasks * Migrated from a self-hosted MySQL server to multiple Aurora and Redis clusters * Developed a Ruby-based monitor/alarm generation framework, used to generate 1000+ monitors/alarms for Goodreads operations * Developed a caching framework that cut book page server-side time by 33% * Architected a system for responding to DSARs to comply with CCPA; asynchronously and securely collects data from 150+ sources and delivers archive to user * Mentored junior members of team ### Senior Software Engineer (Consultant) @ Hearst Jan 2006 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco, CA (Remote) Architect of web framework used by Hearst's magazine sites (Cosmopolitan, Esquire, etc.) and content management system. Projects include: * personal development environments for engineers * facility for production code triggers and rollbacks * version-controlled database migrations * automated tests using simulated web requests and a mock data store * cache optimization, leading to the open-sourcing of a new Perl cache framework (CHI) ### Manager and Senior Software Engineer (Consultant) @ VeriFone Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco, CA Migrated ChargeSmart website (http://www.chargesmart.com/) from a single server to multiple servers, upgrading to latest Apache / Perl / CPAN stack in the process. Created Amazon EC2 based dev environment for each developer, synced via Puppet and svn. Launched new payment site framework on Poet + Mason 2, integrating with VeriFone's SAIL platform. Managed team of four developers initially, then moved to individual contributor role. ### Software Engineer (Consultant) @ Lexy Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | San Francisco, CA Revamped and launched new audio sharing website (http://lexy.com/) using Perl, Catalyst, and jQuery. Significantly improved response time for end users, by replacing Flash with AJAX on the front end and introducing caching and other optimizations on the back end. ### Software Engineer (Consultant) @ Ensenda Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | San Francisco, CA Architect of new web framework for Ensenda's website and web service layer. Achieved significant performance improvement over previous architecture by modernizing software components, adding a lightweight reverse-proxy (accelerator) server, and preloading modules and computations at server startup time. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Amazon.com Jan 2003 – Jan 2006 | Seattle, WA Senior software engineer (SDE III) and architect for the world's largest retail website. Played significant role in Amazon's migration to new Mason-based website platform. Made significant improvements to page rendering performance. Created a service that aggregated hundreds of pieces of information about products into a single API. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Brightmail, Inc. Jan 2001 – Jan 2003 | San Francisco, CA Developer of web applications and back-end systems for spam detection group. Researched spam-detection technologies; significantly improved performance of inbound email processing; led conversion from CGI to mod_perl/Mason. ### Manager and Senior Software Engineer @ AvantGo, Inc. Jan 1999 – Jan 2001 | San Mateo, CA Manager of nine-person team responsible for technologies underlying AvantGo's web site, Internet sync service, and hand-held user interface. ### Software Engineer (Consultant) @ Moviestreet, Inc. Jan 1999 – Jan 1999 | San Francisco, CA Consultant for e-commerce company that sells kid's videos and music. Converted site to Perl/Mason. Build content management and version control system. Significantly improved performance of site with caching and optimizations. ### Instructor @ Dan Keller Technical Services Jan 1999 – Jan 1999 | San Francisco, CA Instructor for a technical services company. Taught intermediate and advanced Perl classes at several Fortune 500 companies. ### Deputy Technical Director @ CMP Media Jan 1996 – Jan 1999 | San Francisco, CA Deputy Technical Director for online division of large publishing company. Developed Mason, a web site delivery system used to serve millions of pages a day on over twenty CMP sites (TechWeb, Information Week, Windows Magazine, etc). Developed ad server that delivered CMP's online ads for a year. Managed group of seven software developers. ## Education ### MS in Computer Science Cornell University ### BS in Logic and Computation Carnegie Mellon University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jonathanswartz - Portfolio: http://www.code30.com/ - Portfolio: http://www.openswartz.com/ - Portfolio: http://www.masonhq.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/jonathanswartz JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/jonathanswartz/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12