# Patrick Leighton

> Senior Software Engineer - Events

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/patrickleighton

I'm a software engineer with a passion for solving difficult problems with elegant and novel solutions. I have extensive work experience writing in C, C#, GoLang, Java, Python, and Terraform. I have also loved collaborating using Github and Jira.

In my first 2 months at Verkada, I achieved annualized savings of ~$300k by refactoring a Kubernetes transcoding service. I then updated the same service to retain facial recognition metadata when translating from H.265 (HEVC) to H.264.

At Ancestry, I led the Communities DNA product, which shows customers which region or even city their ancestors came from. I also utilized AWS spot instances and newer Graviton EC2 instances to save >$100k annually for my team.

At Grayhill, I architected a UI framework for the brand-new Touch Encoder and wrote a multi-threaded embedded Linux application to interpret that framework. I also wrote and maintained drivers in the Linux kernel and wrote software to automate our manufacturing and validation processes.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer - Events @ Hayden AI
Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, CA
• Increased performance of license plate upload to reduce from >1 minutes to <5 seconds (~95% reduction)
• Designed and implemented cloud-based video signature verification using PKCS and x509

### Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Team @ Verkada
Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | San Mateo, California, United States
• In my first 2 months, I achieved annualized savings of ~$300k by refactoring a Kubernetes transcoding service
• Updated the same transcoding service to retain facial recognition metadata when translating from 
 H.265 (HEVC) to H.264

### Senior Software Engineer - Genomic Algorithms @ Ancestry
Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
• Lead the development of our Communities DNA product
• Worked with AWS SageMaker to better scale the model handoff from the ML scientists to production

### Software Engineer - Genomic Algorithms @ Ancestry
Jan 2019 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco, California, United States
• Used AWS, Python, and Terraform to support >20 million DNA customers
• We used Python, EC2, ECS, Lambda, and SQS to keep code readable and easily scalable

### Lead Software Engineer - Research & Development @ Grayhill
Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | La Grange
Architected software for the brand-new Touch Encoder from concept to prototype to production
• Created a UI framework for defining customer-built applications on this device
• Created a multi-threaded application which interprets the UI framework
• Maintained an embedded Linux BSP, including writing, debugging, and editing drivers

### Software Engineering Intern - Radio Management @ Motorola Solutions
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Schaumburg, Illinois, United States
Summer Internship over the summers of 2014 and 2015
• Added search and sort functionality to a radio management application
• Upgraded the SQL database to allow multi-system functionality in a radio repeater application
• Enhanced radio management software application with an email notification system using SMTP
• Completed several features and bugfixes for the radio and repeater management applications to improve our customers' experiences


## Education
### Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science
The University of Texas at Austin


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/patrick-leighton

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Source: https://flows.cv/patrickleighton
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/patrickleighton/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-01