# Simon S. > Software Engineer Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/simons1 Highly opinionated developer looking to make codebases and teammates better. Experience in monoliths and microservices, monorepos and manyrepos. Builds features and fixes build tools. ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Opto Investments Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Software Engineer @ LeapYear Technologies Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Berkeley, California, United States * Built ETL tool to gather metrics from CI system's reliability and performance, reducing failure rate on CI jobs by nearly 50% in 2 months * Rewrote most existing infrastructure-as-code, separating out infrastructure deployment from service deployment, improving deployment maintainability and reliability * Authored and deployed the first Helm-managed service on Kubernetes at the company, kickstarting the push for Kubernetes-based deployments elsewhere * Rebuilt fragile and/or highly interconnected portions of the build system in Bazel to reduce surprises while writing code * Initiated push to use a binary package manager for internal and external artifact delivery. Deployed, configured, and managed the binary package manager * Managed release process, from cutting branches to deploying test bed environments to performing security scans of release candidates ### Software Engineer @ Palantir Technologies Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area At some point in late 2017 or early 2018 it became clear that I was no longer a quality engineer but rather a software engineer developing features for the core product. * In conjunction with my time as a quality engineer, evolved from a bash know-its-all to a highly-opinionated Java developer. * Wrote the curriculum for a yearly software engineering best practices reading group. The goals of the group are to make interns and new hires more productive in their codebases in a short period of time. Helped build a distributed database enabling customers to synchronize data across different instances of the Gotham data analysis platform. This data sharing (called Nexus Peering) is resilient to network failures and tracks data history across different data and security models. * Rewrote database schema allowing Nexus Peering to track non-Gotham source systems * Improved reliability and performance of end-to-end Nexus Peering test infrastructure by 8% and around 25%, respectively * Worked to standardize the way developers set up local environments ### Quality Engineer @ Palantir Technologies Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area * Managed test infrastructure for a specialized, distributed database. Test failures would result in blocking releasing of the core product. * Learned Java while in this role * Expanded my knowledge of the core product codebase to a point where it was unclear to people (including myself) whether I was a developer or a quality engineer. * Learned to interact with AWS, Jenkins, and other third party infrastructure. * Wrote several features in the core product to improve its debug-ability. * Wrote many bug fixes to the core product, most discovered by the test infrastructure. End date is very rough and specifies more when I felt like my day-to-day role changed from mostly quality work to mostly development work. ### Regression Quality Engineering Intern @ Palantir Technologies Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Francisco Bay Area • Tested data analysis software as a member of the RQE team. • Performed end-user and final pass testing before releases to ensure shipped product met performance and functionality requirements. • Documented new features and functionality and wrote workflows to ensure proper test coverage in the future. • Refactored many old testing workflows to be deterministic, repeatable, and, most importantly, readable. • Designed and developed a plugin to visualize MLB’s PITCHf/x pitch data to demonstrate the platform's ability to visualize such data. ### Student Director @ The University of Chicago Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Greater Chicago Area • Acted as one of the University’s liaisons with the incoming students and parents during the University's weeklong Orientation Week. • Lead a team of Orientation Leaders to complete various project assignments, such as manning information kiosks, directing traffic during events, and setting up spaces for events, over the course of the week to prepare for O-Week activities and events. • Assisted with several information sessions to help new students become acquainted with the University and the city of Chicago. ### IT Intern: Quality Assurance @ Major League Baseball Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Greater New York City Area EBIS 2.0 • Executed test plans for testing the Domestic Amateur Scouting, Domestic Amateur Player Management, and Rule 4 Draft functionality of EBIS 2.0. • Reported and tested bugs to help development team build create a stable, user-friendly EBIS. • Wrote user guides for EBIS 2.0 for user workflows that have been distributed to the Major League Scouting Bureau and MLB clubs as they learn to operate the new software. • Wrote test cases and test scripts for EBIS 2.0 to prepare for third party testing. PIA+ • Verified accuracy of statistics in the PIA+ application. • Ran various performance tests on use cases in the PIA+ application. ### Quality Assurance Intern @ Elemental Technologies Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Portland, Oregon Area • Tested hardware and video encoding software a as a member of the QA team. • Wrote and managed hundreds of test cases that provided step-by-step instructions for both using and testing the product. • Executed release cycle test runs and regression testing with customer workflows. • Tested new software and hardware to help them meet customer expectations for their use cases. • Experience with many different video and audio stream formats. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Mathematics University of Chicago ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/simon-s-01064074 --- Source: https://flows.cv/simons1 JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/simons1/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10