FAQ
What’s my Leadership Style?
Every team interacts differently and there is no one method or process that works for all teams. I prefer to let a high-performance team find what makes them tick and then support and observe. Don’t find solutions for problems that don’t exist. Identify problems and collectively work to a solution. Be a coach but also if necessary, take action. Don’t let teams suffer from analysis paralysis.
Where is your Career Going?
I plan to continue in backend and data analytics work focusing on modern solutions in serverless and containers in languages such as Go, JS, and TS.
Where Did You Start?
In my first full-time position, I was a black box QA at a cryptographic security blade company, HIFN. We produced a custom ASIC for gigabit network blades for network appliances. Over the next few years, I advanced out of QA and left the company as a firmware engineer.
Over time, I did firmware in the communication stack on medical devices, digital rights management for CE devices, streaming stack in CE devices, mobile programming (Windows CE), Java-based content ingestion pipeline, R&D on future products, data analytics pipeline, and serverless and microservices systems.
Most Memorable Career Achievements?
In my early days, I troubleshooter and isolated a PCI arbiter issue on an EST development board. This required me to hand connect 64+ probes to a PCI bus to a logic analyzer, read back-to-back a book on the PCI protocol, and debug the traces for the offending signal. We didn’t have a bus analyzer hence the manual work on the probes. EST confirmed the issue on the arbiter and issued me a firmware patch. At this time, I had no idea about the PCI protocol. Everything in this search for the fix was learned on my own, literally.
My second achievement that I’m pretty proud of to was completely redesigning the multi-threaded architecture of a streaming 4k stack to be 100% mutex/sem free. I took a gamble to redesign the stack and the multi-threaded processes to communicate exclusively on message queues. This completely eliminated critical sections and simplified the logic for easier troubleshooting. If you’ve ever debugged a system that is both threaded and covered in callbacks, welcome to callback hell.
I’ll end with my final achievement and which was trying to start my own product/company. I learned a lot about how people are motivated (or not). I learned how to time manage to moonlight, go to grad school, and work a full-time job. I did this for about 3 years of which the first year I wasn’t in school yet. These were 3 years of over 60+ hours of work days, all weekends, etc. I taught myself React (build a whole console on my own). I built the entire data processing pipeline that would take users’ drone imagery and then send it to our photogrammetry in the cloud. This was years before ANY company began introducing a cloud service for remote sensing that actually was affordable. It was a really fun time and I don’t regret a single moment of it, despite it not working out.
What are You Learning Now?
As of Q1 2023 (assuming I update this) I really like JS/TS as a serverless language, but GoLang is my new friend. Been spending time building out a serverless gateway using Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Go Lambdas.
As of Q3 2024, I’ve moved a lot of my attention to being proficient in Python as Nautilus incorporates a wide variety of large data frame analyses (billions of rows) with a focus on high-performance computation.
LANGUAGES AND ENVIRONMENTS
C, C++ (20+y), Javascript/Typescript/Node (8+y), Java (3+y), Python(3+y)
SKILLS, FRAMEWORKS, AND TOOLS
Front-end: React, Redux Amazon Web Services (AWS): DynamoDB, Route53, EC2, Cloudfront, Batch, GreenGrass IOT, CloudFormation, S3, Lambda, API Gateway, DAX, Fargate, ECS, ECR, ELB, VPC, IAM, ElasticCache, Amazon MQ/RabbitMQ, CodePipeline, CodeBuild Microservices: Helm, Docker, Kubernetes (GCP/EKS), Databases: ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, MySQL, Redis, Neo4j Provisioning: Vagrant, Puppet, Ansible Big Data, Business Intelligence: SnowFlake, S3, RedShift, Ascend, Looker, PySpark Load testing frameworks: Locust, Artillery
Media technology company with a long portfolio of innovations in codec, media format, and streaming technologies. Millions of users and over a billion downloads for the DivX software and a mobile app, Grove, gives our users a new way to experience, reimagine, and relive their experiences.
Four+ years member of the executive staff team and reporting to the CEO. Managing a diverse team of 10 engineers, interns, and multiple off-site contractors. A technically competent leader with thousands of commits; over 40k lines of code and written over 100 pages of documentation
Leading effort to expand revenue growth in products. Within 6 months, the revenue program resulted in a 20% increase in ad revenue and a 200% increase in installer revenue in legacy products. Revenue growth attributed to planned feature definition, marketing concepts, and analytics to evaluate install rates and campaign success. Directly responsible for developing a 2023 consumer roadmap goal to continue to double revenue and balance losses
Leading and implementing technology decisions from product to internal operations; these include ZenHub for Agile/Kanban management, Apache Superset for Business Intelligence, Neo4J for Recommendation Engine, and ElasticSearch for geospatial and document queries; including a successful POC with Looker
Reduced AWS cloud expenditures by 20% through reserved compute purchasing, selective migration of assets to on-premises VSphere cluster, and negotiating price reductions via sales.
Built data lakes and warehouses in GCP, AWS, and Snowflake. BigQuery ETL of Firebase data into Ascend for mobile application analytics and AWS Kinesis for Mailchimp data into Ascend. Deployment of Apache Superset into Kubernetes integrated with Snowflake warehousing and Ascend data streams
Technically responsible for all backend architecture and development as well as management of mobile and desktop software teams.
Architected and built backend services for using serverless REST gateways defined by Swagger/OpenAPI written in JS/Typescript.
Implemented backend using multiple database systems; DynamoDB for transactional, ElasticSearch spatial and doc searching, NEO4J Graph for recommendations, and REDIS for an in-memory store.
Implemented clusterless container system using Fargate. Deployed larger Kubernetes cluster for content moderation state machines and jobs, transcoding, data gardening, Socket.io, and other container-based tasks
Security first design with JWT authorization, lambdas in private subnets, and encryption at rest. Mandated certificate pinning for all mobile clients
Designed protection specification and deployment of countermeasures using Digital.ai Application Security (formerly Arxan technologies) used in high-threat applications such as digital commerce and gaming to prevent reverse engineering, code alteration, and anti-debug
An on-demand, pay-as-you-go, cloud-native, platform for remote sensing, spatial analysis, and in-situ data synthesis. Lower the barrier to entry for research and industry requiring spatial intelligence such as precision agriculture and construction.
Built React-base console with Redux including all graphic design and user interface flows
Built cloud photogrammetry pipeline with Correlator 3D to process Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Serverless API gateway for console using Swagger/OpenAPI to model REST gateway with a DynamoDB with custom CI/CD using Gitlab.
Built a custom drone with NIR and visible spectrum cameras to gather sample data
Nautilus Biotechnology, Principal Engineer/Manager
We are building a proteomics instrument for large-scale, single-molecule detection and analysis in a multi-disciplinary team from custom hardware, advanced molecular chemistry, and cloud base high-performance computing for large data analysis.
Responsible for a team of four engineers developing various products including our HPC cloud workflows, on-instrument communication system, customer portals, and on-instrument user interface.
Design and implementation of fleet management system using Ansible and AWS CDK for control of heterogeneous fleets composed of computational cores, virtual systems, and integrated instruments with GreenGrass IOT.
Responsible for porting algorithms developed in-house bioinformatics to cloud infrastructure for stability and performance.
DivX, LLC, Director of Software Engineering
(2018 - 2023)
Verdant Alpha, LLC, DBA: Celadon Sky, Co-Founder
2016 - 2018
Streaming 4k live sporting events with partnerships in NHL and UFC as well as delivering on-demand sporting content to consumer electronics devices.
Four years in SDK development and management for 7 engineers for the Neulion 4K digital platform SDK, Certification System, and Microservices
Technical lead for 4k Digital Rights Management and Media Playback stack working with a cross-functional team of over 15 engineers using HTML5 EME, OMX-IL, and GStreamer
Developed microservices including orchestration for 4k licensing services in HLS and DASH. Used sidecar SSL proxy container to accelerate SSL termination and set up HA Proxy for network load balancing to achieve 10k transactions per second measured via Locust. Deployed on a Kubernetes 1.4 cluster tested to over 15k transactions a second
NeuLion, Inc. Senior Staff Software Engineer / Senior Manager
2014 - 2018
Designed and was the primary contributor to DivX’s Content Ingestion System for ingesting and encrypting assets for Inflight Entertainment customers written in Java
Designed and principal developer for protected playback components in DivX Desktop Player 10
Designed and principal developer for a method to embed cryptographic payloads in a bitstream for H.264 and MPEG4 ASP using reserved fields
Rovi. Inc. Staff Software Engineer
2010 - 2014
Various positions in software development and architecture in embedded development in healthcare, research and security.