# Ryan Oblak > Mindful Software Architect Location: Berkeley, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/ryanoblak Seasoned software engineer with 18+ years experience in industry and 28+ years experience programming. Expertise in backend systems, including web and data streaming architectures. I feel it's important to keep the end user in mind at all times, even when working on the deepest internal details. Strong communication skills and understanding of team dynamics. I believe that a healthy culture is a prerequisite for a team to realize its true potential. I work to build such cultures within my teams. Long-time open source contributor. I'm inspired by the open source movement and have committed significant amounts of open source code. As of writing, my largest open source project has more than 6.3M downloads on Rubygems and over 1,400 stars on Github (https://github.com/rroblak/seed_dump). Mindfulness practitioner. My engineering has been deeply informed by mindfulness practice. I aim to bring mindfulness to all aspects of the software development process. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Alchemy Jan 2022 – Present I'm "über" technical lead overseeing the teams responsible for Alchemy's core API product. In this role I've helped improve reliability, performance, and scale a system that serves billions of requests a day. My time has been divided between: 1) designing and implementing architectural improvements as an individual contributor, 2) providing feedback to and mentoring other engineers, and 3) horizontal initiatives to improve overall engineering culture and process. ### Software Architect @ Okta, Inc. Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 I spent my first couple of years at Okta building and scaling our streaming analytics infrastructure. My contributions ran the gamut of scaling our pipeline by two orders of magnitude in two years and exposing our analytics data via a new customer-facing API. In the last 3 years I split my time on two objectives: 1) as an individual contributor, improving the resilience and scale of Okta's core Identity offering and 2) as a product owner, guiding resilience, scale, and infrastructure priorities for Workflows, Okta's no-code platform. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Okta, Inc. Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area ### Senior Software Engineer @ Stormpath Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Stormpath was acquired by Okta a month after I joined. ### Senior Software Engineer @ LinkedIn Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Mountain View, CA I led a 5-person engineering team responsible for LinkedIn's Hadoop-based scheduled communications platform that serves hundreds of millions messages/week. Before that I was part of a 4-person team that designed and built a completely new highly-scalable real-time (Samza-based) holistic communications platform that brought more intelligence to how LinkedIn communicates with its users. In production the system processes 300+ million messages/week. Java/Scala/Samza/Spark/Hadoop/Linux. ### Senior Software Engineer @ SaveUp Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 I was part of a talented team that designed, implemented, and maintained our online financial rewards platform. I led our financial data project to interface with Intuit to securely process and analyze 250k+ transactions a day. I architected and administered our production server systems, including our load-balanced app server cluster and replicated db servers. I also co-led our Android app, both frontend and backend. Ruby on Rails/Postgresql/Javascript/HTML/Linux/Nginx/Unicorn. SaveUp was acquired in 2014 by WL Benefits Groups, and the engineering team joined LinkedIn. ### Software Engineer @ Silver Spring Networks Jan 2010 – Jan 2011 | Redwood City, CA Silver Spring Networks is leader in the smart grid energy network space. At Silver Spring I was part of a 3-person team that designed, developed, and maintained a web-based secure network configurator. Our project aimed to solve the problem of remotely bootstrapping and configuring network devices that were notoriously difficult to configure, all from a simple web interface. We scaled the application to support tens of thousands of network devices over both Silver Spring's mesh network and 3G cell networks. ### Software Engineer @ PrepMe Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 | Mountain View, CA PrepMe is an online education company that seeks to offer a high-quality, adaptive online learning experience. I was PrepMe's second engineer. We started out in an apartment, designing and building PrepMe's online learning management system (LMS) that would teach hundreds of thousands of students. We built a compelling product, raised funding, and grew from there. PrepMe was acquired by Ascend Learning in 2011. ### Software Engineering Intern @ PrepMe Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 | Mountain View, CA ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Math and Computational Science with an emphasis on Biology Stanford University ### Started taking undergraduate CS classes at age 14 Wichita State University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ryan-oblak --- Source: https://flows.cv/ryanoblak JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ryanoblak/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11