# Joshua Richardson

> Principal Engineer at TaxBit

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/joshuarichardson

Principal software architect versed in technology and project delivery, forged in the fire of Silicon Valley.   Overall 20+ years experience:  Three years managing tech programs for dozens and guiding work of hundreds, and twelve years directly managing up to 14 devs.

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer @ TaxBit
Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
Tech lead for the Integrations team since I joined, which underpins two of three business lines, ingesting and parsing blockchain data from dozens of sources, and dozens more “smart”  contracts
Most recently tech lead for customer-facing product, spanning big data storage, real-time and batch serving, and front end
Pioneered migration to linear project management, and use of Cursor AI-driven development, with MCP and other integrations
Assets service starting Q2 2024 - retired old APIs, fixed up retools, oversaw rewrite onto Iceberg, with 10x+ better throughput, and AI-driven asset acquisition, 10x’ing the size of our catalog, and introducing asset relations.
Enterprise Ingestion and Principle Markets Tooling Q4  2024, adding architecture docs, and full automation / self-service 
Formulated our roadmap in consultation with cross functional partners to maximize opportunities for growth, enabling multi-millions in new recurring revenue opportunities. I also designed developed systems to enable auto-checking with the help of my team..
Led the team to make our systems 10-20 times faster and 100x cheaper  to run, and we set the company standard for CI/CD, system transparency, and reliability, including auto-code-freezes, one-button rollback, comprehensive test suites and hooks with blue/green deployment
Improved the morale of the 9 person team through mentoring, vision, goal-setting, and pride in craft.
Organizational-wide contributions include driving internal data model liberalization, complete reorganization of our wiki pages, seeding a Tech Radar, standards on diagramming, tech design template, and “post-mortem” monthly discussions.

### Platform Architect @ Chegg Inc.
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Santa Clara, CA
Worked as architect and chief of staff across all of Chegg Learning Services (seven offices, ~500 engineers, 30+ staff engineers directly) to develop joint standards and drive technical development and adoption.
* Moved from from <99.5% uptime across all systems in the company to 99.95%
* Ran Services Program (tech initiatives on the backend) with 20+ working groups at a time, developing:  microservices (Java, Node, Lambda), database layer, inter-service communication with circuit-breaker, graphQL / federation, and API Gateway with AuthN/AuthZ; workflows with Kafka, Zeebe, and Step Functions, …
• Ran weekly international architecture leads meetings
* Ran >4/5-rated  weekly engineering-wide learning sessions and retrospectives
* Ran annual internal summits with 45 sessions and external summit with >52k impressions, >2k likes, shares, comments, etc., 450 registrations, and 200 attendees, all averaging > 4.5/5 rating.
* Provided dozens of architecture reviews and support for all learning services teams and helped evaluate many new technologies (e.g. gRPC, Kotlin, PostGres) and vendors
• Standardized with working groups, RFCs, POCs, & adoption campaigns:
o  Reference architecture for the full stack
o  Project documentation & diagramming standards
o  Data persistence solutions with Terraform: Dynamo + Aurora
o  Data platform, from message bus through analytics & services
o  API request and response standard parameters, headers, & fields
o  Tech Rigor - multi-point audit process, and release checks
o  Logging and application performance monitoring dashboards
o  QE Standards
o  US engineering hiring process, including interview training, onboarding & testing
o  Training & employee mobility

### Principal Engineer - Chegg Web Services @ Chegg Inc.
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | Santa Clara, CA
* Worked with a vendor to develop an algorithm to automatically scale our container cluster in superior ways to what AWS provided.
* Product and tech leader for Data Catalog, maintaining all company data in AWS S3, indexed with MySQL, accessed through Java microservice, working with other Java microservices, powering Ruby UI.
* Leader of Individual Contributor Leads Roundtable.
* Developed architecture program and best-practices internal wiki-portal.

### Principal Engineer - Content Engineering @ Chegg Inc.
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Santa Clara, California, United States
* Product leader for Data Catalog. Developed requirements and architecture. Led engineering team of 8 in Ukraine to build it. Presented and trained users. Exceeded target of 50 internal monthly users in first quarter. Core features: tagging and data extensions, duplicate prevention, auto-versioning, user query parsing, faceted search.
* Other systems architected and built: Feed Storage using Cassandra and JsonSchema, Receiving Java API + FTP/S3/MySQL storage, Code Critic webhooks patent-winning design, Access Rights authorization management UI

### Principal Engineer - EBook Engineering @ Chegg Inc.
Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | Santa Clara, California, United States
Responsible for converting print-PDFs from nearly every major textbook publisher into html5, keeping formatting intact and injecting semantics.  Open-source solution saved company $5M annual contract, used to this day.
* Print margins (crop marks, annotations, and notes for the printer). I wrote a Hough transform in C to crop them out with 100% success rate.
* Extending pdftohtml, FontForge, node.js, and other open-source. MVP within three months, and 99.9% accuracy within a year. We traded the algorithms.
* Regularly reconvert, index, and QA 1-million title library: 600-node Condor cluster on volatile AWS spotinst cluster. Checkpointing and auto-restart. 200k lines of code and > 1M lines under management; almost maintenance-free.
* C/C++ system with Python test framework to achieve 80% reduction in the size and number of fonts; thirty point improvement in net-promoter score.
* Patented system to parse out figures and tables and enable pop-up content

### Software Engineer Principal @ Yahoo!
Jan 2011 – Jan 2011
* Increased speed of regex plugin for Apache Traffic Server O(m*n) to O(n).
* Designed hot-reload solution for Java platform underlying next-gen media sites

### Sr. Engineering Mgr - Finance @ Yahoo!
Jan 2010 – Jan 2011
* Led 12+ member team of senior FE & BE engineers
* All finance.yahoo.com applications and data-services, except quote pages.
* Led all corporate-initiative and maintenance projects.
* Led internationalization re-architecture -  all phases on time and UNDER budget.
* Led 8-person task force for all Y! Media Engineering to reduce release time from 14 hours to 5 minutes, known now as CI/CD.

### Engineering Mgr - Finance @ Yahoo!
Jan 2009 – Jan 2010
* Eight senior engineers:  Tech Ticker, Portfolios, and site navigation.
* Internationalization re-architecture on schedule to six international markets
* Assisted other teams to pull schedule back from projected one-month delay.
* Helped grow market share, and reduced customer complaints by 66% in the U.S.
* Hired high-performing engineers / train and promote two key players.

### Engineering Manager Y! Local @ Yahoo!
Jan 2008 – Jan 2009
Rebuilt the Upcoming engineering team (upcoming.yahoo.com) from scratch, and expanded it to a seven-engineer junior powerhouse which achieved
* 50% more user retention through better features, interfaces, and algorithms
* In one year: 10x content, 3x traffic, and #1 market reach
* High-availability, low-latency, high-prominence front page module on Yahoo!
* 90% of career-development goals across team
* more than a dozen internal award-winning hackathon submissions.

### Engineering Manager, Y! Autos @ Yahoo!
Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | Sunnyvale, CA
Manage seven engineers on various projects, including architecting the next generation autos.yahoo.com and managing resources between infrastructure improvement projects, product development, partner support, and special opportunity projects.  Helped move autos.yahoo.com into the number one spot as the most trafficked internet destination for automotive research.  Created passionate, successful team.

### Senior Technical Yahoo! @ Yahoo!
Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 | Sunnyvale, CA
Lead for Yahoo! Autos:  Technical lead for Used Autos, My! Autos, Autos Finance, Maintenance, KBB, and Autos Custom Installer Directory, responsible for the development, maintenance, and operation of more than half the traffic on Yahoo! Autos.  Other roles:  Technical lead AutoTrader partnership, technical lead special revenue projects, assistant scrummaster autos, scrummaster used autos, scrummaster installer directory, scrummaster traffic growth and retention project, Q/A committee lead, technical lead customer feedback project, technical lead hardware planning and acquisition.

### Technical Yahoo! (mainstream) @ Yahoo!
Jan 2003 – Jan 2004 | Sunnyvale, CA
Engineer for Yahoo! Autos:  Rearchitected or built many of the site components, including expert reviews, My! Autos, maintenance, finance, and used car listing sections.  Built tools and processes adopted by the Autos group, and co-chaired committee to set coding standards and conventions.

Engineer for Yahoo! Mail:  Served as technical lead for the Lease Server System, where I finalized the algorithm, design, implemented, tested, led code review, and documented a critical component of Y!'s bulk email consumer product.

### Software Engineer @ Yahoo!
Jan 1999 – Jan 2003
Support engineer for Yahoo! Autos:  Rearchitected self-service listing service for autos classifieds, co-architected major integration of KBB data service.
Lead engineer for Yahoo! Get Local:  Engineering team of one, converted directory business into first dynamic localized services hub, integrating localized services from all over the company on aggressive timelines and more than doubling Y! Get Local traffic in the process.
Lead engineer for Yahoo! Restaurants: Engineering team of one, took the business from novelty restaurants directory to the best restaurants site on the web with data from every major internet player in the space and myriad features. Also took it to profitibility over the course of a year.

Core engineer for Yahoo! Politics:  Architected integration of primary data partner with design and optimization of feed, Oracle database, indexing, and web components.


## Education
### MS in Cognitive and Neural Systems
Boston University

### BA in Computer Science / Cognitive Science
University of Rochester


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joshua-richardson-878b8b1
- Portfolio: http://jric.awardspace.us/Resume.html

---
Source: https://flows.cv/joshuarichardson
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/joshuarichardson/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12