# Josh Trate

> Senior Software Engineer

Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/joshtrate

Software Engineer focusing on big data with Typescript, Python and AWS experience. Always on the lookout for a good puzzle. I walk the line between backend and infrastructure, with experience building multi-terabyte scale data lakes and streaming event systems. I miss the days when performance wasn't an afterthought, and things had to be fast from the start.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Qualtrics
Jan 2022 – Present | Greater Seattle Area
Team lead for the XM Directory Analytics Team. Owner of two terrabyte scale ETL pipelines with a track record of delivering features on time and reducing operational overhead. Some of our larger projects include:

Transaction Enrichment Based Segments
- Designed enhancements to our query language to support a new resource type
- Implemented new filters in our query API for the new resource type
- Built new ETL pipeline for new resource type
- Delivered the project on-time with no major bugs reaching production

Contact History Ingestion Optimization
- Reduced peak ingestion lag from ~5hrs to ~5minutes
- Eliminated the source of half our customer reported bugs
- Worked cross-org to add extra context in events, eliminating ~25% of calls made by our service
- Improved directory cache lookup hit rate from 5% to ~90%
- Improved contactId cache lookup hit rate from ~2% to 70%

Contact Centric Dashboards
- Build onboarding UI for contacts datasets
- Mentored back-end project lead on parallel data loading (chunking) enhancement
- Worked cross-org with the dashboards team to ensure our datasets are displayed correctly in their UI
- Measured and tuned alert noise generated by the new system, reducing alert fatigue

### Software Engineer @ Qualtrics
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Greater Seattle Area
Back end engineer focusing on big data platforms with Typescript, Scala and AWS experience

Survey Based Segments
    • Wrote design doc, organized design review, negotiated scope with PMs, created tasks and timeline
    • Designed legacy question id to fieldset field id conversion enabling ~50 services to query survey data
    • Standardized legacy question id conversion process w/ data platform and data lake teams
    • Implemented legacy id conversion in segments query engine with NodeJS and Typescript
    • Added survey question support to segments query API using NodeJS and Typescript

Query Optimization
    • Created query scale testing tool with cache defeating randomization and statistical sampling in python
    • Implemented batching query scheduler in Typescript, increased query throughput 10x in production 
    • Scale tested segmentation with 2000 queries/hr on 1M-10M row datasets, unblocking large customers

Qualtrics Data Lake
    • Designed file based ingestion API using S3 presigned URLs, file upload events and SQS
    • Implemented file upload API in Scala with the play framework used to upload 100GB/hr to parquet files
    • Developed Avro schema store with Scala API backed by S3. Stores schemas for ~100k datasets
    • Implemented reschematization w/ SQS FIFO Queues and nomad batch jobs to regenerate parquet files
    • Created + implemented disaster recovery plan. Added backups w/ auto restore for data and services
    • Ran quarterly disaster recovery tests. Tested automated recovery from simulated entire DC failure

### Software Developer @ Narrative Science
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Chicago, Il
Designed and implemented fast rollbacks reducing downtime due to bad code by fifteen minutes (40%). Planned and Implemented Auth0 integration into our SAAS product reducing security risks. Implemented authorization framework for SAAS organization hierarchy using JWTs, python, and js. Designed and implemented authorization framework eliminating risk of forgetting auth on new endpoints. Implemented CI/CD pipeline used by 40 developers to deploy 8 times a day with zero downtime. Implemented async database clients for managing organizations and users using python and asyncio. Organize and run a bi-weekly game night with co-workers.


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science
University of Michigan
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/josh-trate-4a4665159

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