I am a systems thinker who excels at understanding, explaining, and contributing to complex high-level architectures and their low-level implementation details. I’m particularly interested in platform engineering, developer tooling, and automated security compliance.

Experience

2022 — NowGretel.aiSenior Software Engineer

2022 — Now

2014 — 20228th LightPrincipal Software Crafter

2014 — 2022

Greater Chicago Area

Platform Engineering

Lead development of a new security-first AWS platform

Remediated over 100 third party security audit findings

Improved CIS Benchmarks security score over thirty percentage points

Obviated 90% of total static IAM user access keys by establishing role-based auth patterns for both local and CI environments

Created, managed resources in, and coordinated cross-account access between thirty AWS accounts

Updated Terraform codebases to help migrate teams' cloud services to new accounts

Developed an internal registry for shared Terraform modules to standardize infrastructure

Set up a shared Datadog instance with platform-level tagging to facilitate service observability

Data Engineering

Lead development of a serverless data ingestion pipeline for analyzing and improving a global reinsurer’s loss ratio

Parsed policy and claim data in 10 different file formats and schemas to load into a normalized PostgreSQL database

Developed SQL and Python transformation scripts to enable data team members to explore raw and transformed data with their preferred tools

Developed a Python tool to templatize eleven core PostgreSQL queries for 150 dealers’ source systems to improve dealer onboarding

Lead development and analysis of queries with hundreds of millions of records in SAP systems

Application Development

Experience with both legacy monoliths to greenfield microservices, using Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), Scala (Play, Akka), Clojure, Python, PHP (Laravel), TypeScript (React), Java, Docker, Kafka, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, and Redis

As lead developer, presented system architecture diagrams, addressed scope, timelines, and budgets, and helped define requirements and future functionality

Internal Culture

Authored 11 and edited over 20 coworkers’ posts on the company blog

Mentored 2 coworkers through 8th Light’s software development apprenticeship

Reviewed over 10 applicant code submissions and managed a team of submission reviewers

2013 — 2014UnknownWeb Application Developer

2013 — 2014

I independently built a tool to help librarians at the Batavia Public Library streamline the processes of registering patrons for their summer reading program, tracking their progress throughout the summer, and reporting statistics at the program's conclusion.

I worked in a small distributed team to develop an admin dashboard for Omron Health executives and their corporate clients to observe and analyze user activation, retention, and participation metrics related to corporate wellness programs.

I led development of a Ruby on Rails web application for CQA to facilitate conference event creation and guest reservations, membership payments, content distribution, and group email announcements. I continued to maintain this application for 6 years.

I contributed to the development of Wireharbor Security, an IT risk management solution.

Education

2005 — 2009

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

B.A.

2005 — 2009

2008 — 2008

Trinity College Dublin

English

2008 — 2008

2013 — 2013

The Starter League

Web Development

2013 — 2013