# Oliver Newland > Seasoned software engineer w/leadership experience Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/olivernewland Specialties: API development, web, back-end systems, getting teams aligned on pragmatic solutions ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer, Events Analytics Platform @ Sentry Jan 2024 – Present As I chose to leave management, search and storage split into a streaming team, and our next-generation storage layer, Events Analytics Platform (with a similarly named team). - Migrated ingestion for our most important dataset, errors, onto our unified platform. Extended our existing ClickHouse deletion system to handle much larger data sizes - Built out a “jobs system” for executing privileged one-off jobs in production without compromising user privacy. This included some light design, gathering requirements, execution, and assisting a junior engineer in implementation Result: has helped the team resolve high-urgency incidents, positive feedback for ease of use and simplicity - Guide more inexperienced employees in the technical intricacies of the systems we own, as well as general software engineering hygiene and professional social structures - Researching solutions to a forced-consistency system we built called the “optimize job”, which has become unreliable over time - As a result of the aforementioned “optimize” work, deep diving ClickHouse merge internals and presenting results to the team - Delivered learning session on the subscription system which powers Sentry alerts, while also making changes to increase its reliability ### Engineering Manager, Storage Team @ Sentry Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 - Provided guidance for engineers on how to get unblocked - Handled escalations when our team was backed up behind dependency teams - Upward reporting and estimations for long-running initiatives - Executed performance reviews and delivered feedback to my reports on a regular basis. Guided 3 reports into promotion into the next level - Owned the on-call process for the storage team ### Senior Software Engineer, Search and Storage @ Sentry Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 The search and storage team built APIs and ingestion consumers that power some of Sentry’s most important data-driven experiences. The underlying database is ClickHouse and we are responsible for both making sure the fleet is properly configured and building abstractions so that product teams can build without being ClickHouse experts. - Worked with a staff engineer to design and implement a low-cardinality metrics storage system based on ClickHouse. This was the basis of “dynamic sampling”, an early iteration of Sentry’s performance product - Helped the team define on-call rituals, drawing from pager rotation experience at Amazon ### Software Development Engineer (II) @ Amazon Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 - built out APIs and data ETL for serving "musical memories"; a feature that supported a "your year in review" widget in visual Amazon Music clients - designed data schema, built out data pipeline, and developed APIs to support a weekly "My Discovery Mix" playlist that goes to millions of Amazon Music customers every week - worked on C++ desktop client changes to support enhanced playlist functionality - built out new Java-based API service in support of a "My Likes" playlist, with the goal of replacing legacy playlist API service - contributed to playlist import project on TypeScript-based Lambda-served external API - member of on-call rotation that handles operational burdens for recents, playlists, and GDPR compliance for all of Amazon Music - reviewed dozens of project plans/proposals from my team and adjacent teams - currently building playlist features for the "Curate Experience" team ### Senior Software Engineer - Platform @ Figure Eight Jan 2014 – Jan 2018 * redesigned and re-wrote our subscription accounting system to be more correct and reliable • ported a ruby/python application to combine image annotations to Java and AWS Lambda, to make the process automatically scalable and much cheaper to execute (in infrastructure costs), simplified logic and added documentation in the process • proposed and created prototype implementation of ETL process to get production (PostgreSQL) data into our preproduction testing environments, now being put in practice • worked with product team to design, develop, and test new features on complex customer facing product • designed complex queries for data warehouse to test feasibility of new features/product ideas • reviewed multiple Ruby on Rails and SQL code patches/day I also helped put into place processes for: * how defects are reported, by less technical staff * the rotation of watching the "firehose", our bug reporting system ### Lead Software Engineer - WORK Team @ Figure Eight Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco, CA Guided engineering decisions on the contributor side of the CrowdFlower platform, including: * semi-daily Rails coding, usually for complex bug-fixes that would take longer to explain than complete * responsibility for 3 Rails apps, each of which get >10MM hits/day (the largest receives > 100MM) * attending stakeholder and cross-team meetings, prioritizing team work accordingly * team member support, especially regarding architecture details * balancing product requirements with engineering difficulty, and helping translate product requirements into JIRA tickets * communication with off-shore team members * multiple code review/day (sometimes 7 or 8) * mentoring more junior engineers * pushed the state of identity forward on the platform, where it used to be set by external actors * enhanced performance of the platform and made significant user interface improvements ### Senior Software Engineer @ Figure Eight Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 Daily Ruby on Rails coding for the worker side of the CrowdFlower crowd-sourcing platform: * made full-stack changes on a daily basis, usually tested at every level (MVC, and black-box integration testing) * wrote PostgreSQL stored procedures/triggers when made necessary by performance requirements * debugged/troubleshooted a troublesome Clojure application in the platform. * occasionally worked with a legacy Merb application in the platform ### Senior Software Engineer - Applied Machine Learning @ Apple Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 I worked on a new (now launched) platform for fraud detection at Apple, which included: * extensive coding in Java, using modern libraries like Google Guava and Apache Commons * experimenting with Clojure and Groovy for a DSL for data scientists to use * working extensively with the Cassandra data store * integrating with Zookeeper * creating front-end websocket and HTTP+protocol buffer interfaces for client integration * creating a library for other groups at Apple to use to integrate, which included connection pooling, and smart failover. ### Bioinformatics/Machine Learning Intern @ Genentech Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 Working on improving classification of images based on whether they contain crystals, in parallel to my graduate research. ### Freelance Software Developer @ Self Employed Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | San Francisco Bay Area For California PATH: Trained research-oriented developers on programming best-practices. Created custom visualizer with d3.js for unusual fuzzy time-step data. For Relteq Systems: Built extensions to Redmine (Rails 2) platform to create a front-end for an automobile trafficsimulation system. Worked with asynchronous Sinatra and EventMachine programs for long-running jobs and queued execution. Created prototypes in HTML/CoffeeScript for using Google Maps, head.js, jQuery and Underscore.js/Backbone.js auto-generated models together For Logical Reality Design: General company-wide projects as well as specific client sites doing Rails planning and development. ### Software Engineer @ Accusoft Pegasus Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 Wrote internal tools, designed APIs, gathered requirements, implemented designs. ### Associate Software Engineer @ Pegasus Imaging Corporation Jan 2008 – Jan 2009 I am currently in a 3-department rotation of development, support, and QA for .NET and COM APIs. I have worked at this job with C, C++, C#, VB.Net, VB6, and Delphi. ### Intern Software Developer @ WireSpring Technologies, Inc. Jan 2001 – Jan 2006 I programmed over the summers in high school and college, using C, Java, and C# to create a variety of solutions of varying complexity, usually with minimal oversight. ## Education ### Masters in Computer Science San Francisco State University ### Bachelors in Electrical Engineering University of Central Florida ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/theolivern - Website: http://www.github.com/onewland --- Source: https://flows.cv/olivernewland JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/olivernewland/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01