# Toni Rib > Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure @ Skydio Location: Denver, Colorado, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/toni Infrastructure Engineer who transitioned from full stack engineering (mostly Rails/React) in late 2020. Currently supporting some awesome teams at Skydio allowing our customers to fly autonomous drones remotely! At Gusto, I co-founded the Performance Guild to coordinate efforts to improve our application's performance and co-led the Testing Guild to level up our testing practices in the organization. I also helped revamp the incident response and post mortem processes. I'm just as happy to spend my time creating training on how to use performance and observability tools for engineers as I am managing our kubernetes clusters. If I pop up in your Slack channel at work, it's probably to bug you about some non-performant database query I want you to fix. I've spent an unusual amount of time worrying about databases (modeling, performant queries, and upgrades) than most non-DBAs. I hate acronyms even though I realize I just used one. Also a fan of anything Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and basically all science fiction. I run a fantasy football league and can't get enough of the Saints, Trojans, Avalanche, Rockies, and Nuggets. For real...I watch A LOT of sports. I love snowboarding in trees & moguls, and you can instantly peak my interest if you know something about the enneagram (8w7) or scotch. I also play taiko drums, paint colorful abstract paintings, love interior design, enjoy weight lifting, live music, and krav maga, and once I played with the USC marching band at the 2009 Grammys with Radiohead. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer - Infrastructure @ Skydio Jan 2023 – Present | Denver, Colorado, United States - Helped level up our database observability and resilience by implementing timeouts, migration retries (for certain cases), and hooking up relevant Datadog products - Created and presented training for how to use our performance observability tools to debug slow endpoints and be able to fix them - Migrated an application from legacy EC2 instances and non-standard deploys to our kubernetes and standard deployment infrastructure - Help manage our EKS clusters and AWS resources - Set up a new staging environment and migrated all our teams to it in order to enable better testing of our drones and cloud product - The resident Datadog expert, helping migrate our teams away from Sentry and mixpanel and into Datadog for error & event tracking, along with most of their other products - I write lots and lots of docs for engineers in Notion - Implemented framework using python Playwright SDK so engineers can write better end to end tests - Supported our on-prem product, getting mapbox atlas set up for local map usage - Implemented a slack bot that supports our incident response process ### Staff Infrastructure Engineer @ Gusto Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | Denver, Colorado, United States - Migrated a production application from Aptible into our AWS account and onto k8s, including migrating data from existing redis & postgres instances into new ones - Helped standardize our infrastructure for new applications at the company - Part of our SRE on call rotation, monitoring our systems and keeping our applications running smoothly while responding to incidents - Removed an old chef setup from our system and migrate onto ansible, while swapping out custom ubuntu AMIs for our EKS setup to using the Amazon AL2 provided AMIs - Worked on a team-wide project to make it viable to run many different applications safely and securely within one k8s cluster - Co-founded the Performance Guild in 2021, an engineering guild focused on improving the performance of our applications, creating a culture focused on performance, and educating engineers on how they can contribute. Created multiple tools for other engineers to use and to get better visibility into the performance of our system. This completely re-vamped how our organization treats application performance problems. - Co-founded the Testing Guild in 2023 to provide better education and guidance around testing code. Ran a monthly working session with another engineer to help fix non-deterministic tests. - Key part of a working group improving our incident response and post mortem process. Created engineering wide training, set standards & expectations, and updated our post mortem document. - Led a project to make testing in our staging environment viable with large amounts of data. - Performed numerous MySQL and PostgreSQL database version upgrades. - Currently working on coordinating a move of approximately 100 tables out of our main monolith database and into a new database to mitigate performance issues. - L6 engineering IC (Principal/Staff level) who participates in our engineering staff meetings Technologies: - AWS, terraform, kubernetes, helm, PostgreSQL, MySQL, redis, DataDog, ansible, packer ### Senior Software Engineer @ Gusto Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Denver, CO - Full Stack Web Developer (Rails/React/GraphQL) - Spent the first 9 months working on a project integrating with 3rd party APIs to enable user provisioning in other applications from Gusto - Spent 6 months working on the benefits product, enabling our customer experience team to provide multiple benefit package options to the employers we serve during renewal season - Led sessions on story splitting for the team, so we could write better stories with well defined acceptance criteria - Led inceptions for new projects, to get engineers, designers, and product managers on the same page with the work to be done - Mentored more junior engineers on the team through pairing sessions and thorough code reviews - Led architecture sessions for new features to ensure we had solid plan for data modeling, what functionality would be sync vs. async or frontend vs. backend, before diving into actually working the tickets for a new feature - Led ruby architecture sessions and RSpec testing best practices session for the team to help engineers less familiar or new to ruby get on the same page with good patterns and avoid common pitfalls Technologies: - Ruby on Rails, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Apollo, React, gRPC, DataDog, Bugsnag, New Relic ### Software Engineer @ GoSpotCheck Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | Greater Denver Area - Full Stack Web Developer - Managed & implemented features for 2 Ruby on Rails applications (with hybrid jQuery, Backbone, and React/Redux frontends) and 1 Spark/Scala ETL application - Migrated computation intensive processes to async processes to meet a 25 second page load requirement to meet our larger customer's needs - Implemented ETLs in Scala/Spark in order to fix an inherited situation in which a production critical application was down 8 hours a day to transfer and transform data from our main application to a secondary application - Horizontally sharded one of our databases to achieve better performance for companies - Time partitioned multiple tables on one of our PostgreSQL databases in order to improve query performance after determining that 90% of queries were only for the last quarter of data - After a large customer dropped a lot of users into our system, spent a few months with a team of 3 diagnosing performance issues (mostly database related) and finding fixes for them - Partnered with a devops team member to migrate one of our production critical applications from Heroku to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and then gave a talk at KubeCon about our experience in hopes others would learn from it Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Citus, Heroku, Scala, Apache Spark, DataBricks, SumoLogic, JavaScript, ES6, React, Redux, Spark SQL, Google Kubernetes Engine, Harness, CircleCI ### Software Engineer @ Travelers Haven (Hotel Engine) Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Glendale, CO - Backend: Ruby on Rails 4.x, Frontend: JavaScript, Angular - Implemented APIs for consumption by our front end - Consumed 5 different hotel booking APIs to allow users to book multiple rooms in a single request at the lowest rates available - Utilized Google Charts to help the sales & marketing teams better understand our clients and their booking trends Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React ### Senior Systems Engineer @ Raytheon Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Aurora, CO Responsibilities: - Technical lead for Space Link Extension data transfer protocol - Designed and assisted in writing of 45 tests to verify system level requirements - Perform duties outside expected job functions, i.e. executing test procedures for vacationing engineers, authoring custom Perl scripts to analyze data from XML reports The Joint Polar Satellite System Common Ground System http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/jpss/ ### System & Software Safety Engineer @ Raytheon Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Aurora, CO - Assessed over 500 requirements for safety impact and designed hazard controls to prevent mishaps - Cut site inspection times in half by creating new processes, forms, and training to allow effective identification and tracking of issues and resolutions ### Quality Engineer @ Boeing Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | El Segundo, CA - Supported manufacturing by providing weekly quality metrics, nonconformance management, corrective action support, and production support - Enabled technicians to perform effective self-inspections by overhauling the certification process as the Site Focal for the Manufacturing Self Examination initiative Boeing Satellite Development Center http://www.boeing.com/space/ ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering University of Southern California Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 ### Nanodegree in Deep Learning Udacity Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 ### Full Stack Web Development Turing School of Software & Design Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 ### Nanodegree in Front End Web Development Udacity Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 ### High School in High School Diploma Minnetonka Senior High School Jan 2004 – Jan 2007 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tonirib - GitHub: http://github.com/tonirib --- Source: https://flows.cv/toni JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/toni/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22