Derrick Burns Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

As Principal Architect of Mulesoft's cloud platform, I oversee the design of core services that enhance our integration, automation, and API management capabilities. During my tenure, I have:Led an architecture team in creating over 150 new architecture decision records, streamlining decision-making processes.Designed and facilitated a three-day, organization-wide architecture summit, fostering cross-functional collaboration.Contributed to over 100 root cause analyses, significantly improving system reliability and performance.Led a team to dramatically improve service resiliency in a large distributed software system utilizing Kubernetes, Istio, and other cloud-native technologies, enhancing overall system robustness.

San Francisco, California, Us

Led the design of a new platform integrating Tableau and Salesforce technologies, enabling customers to gain real insights from their data. Successfully led a team to develop a working prototype of the platform in less than 30 days.

At Parthenian, LLC, a software consultancy I founded, I leverage my expertise in scalable backend systems, data science, machine learning, natural language processing, distributed systems, and software architecture to drive innovative solutions.Recently, I led a program review for a surgical robotics company owned by two Fortune 50 companies. I assessed the technical and execution risks of launching their first surgical robotic platform and presented my findings to the senior leadership and Board of Directors of all three companies.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

### Emphasizing Leadership and Technical Prowess at TidepoolTidepool.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people manage their diabetes through innovative applications. In 2018, they embarked on developing new medical software for the iPhone, poised to significantly improve the lives of individuals with diabetes and increase backend traffic.As the lead architect engaged by Tidepool, I demonstrated my leadership and technical expertise by designing a new HIPAA-compliant Kubernetes-based infrastructure for their online services. I led the end-to-end migration of their legacy infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration and enhanced performance.Driven by my passion for learning, building, and teaching, I tackled the complex task of migrating a live web service to Kubernetes. My key contributions included:- Refactored the web application (Node.js and Go) to be 12-factor compliant.- Developed all Helm charts from scratch for 18 services.- Set up the CI system (Travis) to generate properly tagged Docker images.- Selected and implemented the CD system (FluxCD).- Managed secrets with various tools, concluding with Sops.- Implemented a service mesh using Linkerd.- Deployed a reverse proxy for single sign-on and zero-trust access (Pomerium).- Configured the API gateway (Gloo) and contributed bug fixes.- Deployed the metrics aggregation system (Prometheus and Grafana).- Implemented log aggregation with Sumo Logic.- Set up a distributed tracing service (Jaeger).- Managed certificate and DNS systems (Certmanager and external-dns).- Ensured least privilege for all AWS resources.- Implemented auto-scaling with a cluster autoscaler.- Developed a tool (tpctl) to customize our five Kubernetes clusters while maintaining consistent configuration.My role at Tidepool showcases my ability to lead complex projects and implement cutting-edge technical solutions, solidifying my reputation as a skilled architect and leader.

Smyte was a leader in safety and security as a service until its acquisition by Twitter in mid-2018.As an algorithms expert and backend engineer at Smyte, I demonstrated deep technical expertise through several key projects:Scalable Workflow System: Designed and implemented a highly scalable workflow system in Go, utilizing Kafka as a job queue and a dynamic set of workers on Kubernetes, hosted on Google Cloud.Real-Time Similarity Search Engine: Engineered a scalable, real-time similarity search engine in C++ leveraging locality-sensitive hashing, protocol buffers, RocksDB, and Kafka. This system supports thousands of operations per second across 20 shards with 2 replicas, running on Kubernetes/Google Container Engine.Open Source Contributions: Developed and open-sourced an implementation of Ted Dunning's t-Digest in C++ for finding quantiles from streaming data, showcasing my commitment to contributing to the broader technical community.These projects highlight my ability to design and implement complex, scalable systems with high performance and reliability.

New York City, New York, Us

As the lead architect at Lonely Planet, one of the world's leading travel information publishers, I demonstrated strong technical leadership by spearheading the creation of a new API for their travel content. I designed a scalable backend system to serve all Lonely Planet content, integrating multiple databases including Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, and WordPress.I led the deployment of all new services on a private Kubernetes cluster hosted on AWS, ensuring robust performance and scalability. This new API and its associated micro-services now power the Lonely Planet website, serving millions of active users each month, reflecting my ability to lead technical teams in delivering high-impact solutions.

As the founder and CTO of Rincaro, LLC, a hedge fund, I demonstrated my entrepreneurial spirit and deep technical expertise by designing and building a complex system that analyzed social media conversations to predict the direction of the US equities markets.I architected the Rincaro backend on the Amazon Web Services platform, leveraging my knowledge in machine learning, statistical decision theory, computational linguistics, functional programming, and scalable systems design. I developed sophisticated algorithms to process and analyze massive volumes of Twitter data, uncovering actionable insights into market behaviors.Additionally, I contributed to the open source community by writing the Generalized K-means Clustering package in Scala, enabling clustering of very large datasets on the Spark platform.At Rincaro, we utilized advanced computational linguistics and machine learning algorithms to process hundreds of terabytes of data, predicting the direction of publicly traded financial instruments in a fully automated manner. Our tech stack included Spark, SciKit-Learn, and Pandas, and we built a highly scalable system using AWS services such as EMR, EC2, SQS, SWS, SNS, RDS, and S3.This experience underscores my ability to innovate, lead, and execute complex technical projects in an entrepreneurial setting.

Us

At Orbital Data, despite being less known than our competitor Riverbed, we achieved significant success, winning half of all head-to-head sales deals. When we sold Orbital Data to Citrix, our business model was identical to Riverbed's, but their larger market penetration posed challenges for future venture investment.As the Vice President of Engineering at Orbital Data, I demonstrated executive leadership by building and leading the engineering team. During my tenure, I successfully doubled the team and consistently delivered high-quality, feature-rich products on time and within budget every six weeks. I pioneered the implementation of agile techniques at Orbital before they became industry standard, fostering an environment of innovation and efficiency.One of my most rewarding experiences was collaborating with our talented engineers to develop complex and effective algorithms for improving TCP/IP network communications.The sale of Orbital Data to Citrix was a technology-driven acquisition, completed with remarkable efficiency. Our engineering team successfully completed the due diligence process in just one week, underscoring our preparedness and technical excellence. Despite our desire to go public like Riverbed, the acquisition highlighted our value and achievements in the industry.

Us

As the first professional VP of Engineering of Trovix, my role was to guide the development of the first product to market. However, when I arrived, the product was little more than an idea: that the tools used to match job descriptions to resumes could be dramatically improved to lower the cost and increase the speed of hiring the RIGHT people. So, instead of managing, I spent the majority of my time as an algorithm designer. I designed the the crown jewel of the company: new technology to extract concepts from resumes!Trovix entered a very mature Job Search market at a time of very little appetite by venture capital for HR technology companies. But Trovix had value to offer: new outstanding technology for matching candidates to jobs using algorithms for concept extraction and identification that I invented.In 2006, Trovix was acquired by Monster.com for its technology.For my work, Trovix was granted U.S. patent #7599930. That patent has been cited over 30 times in other patent applications. A decade after I created it, those seminal algorithms still power Monster.com search today.

San Jose, California, Us

Network Appliance, now a leader in the storage industry, faced significant challenges when I joined as Vice President of Engineering. The company was grappling with a major product release delay, the onset of the 2001 recession, and an outdated, complex codebase. My executive responsibility was to revitalize the engineering department and restore team morale.Shortly after my arrival, NetApp implemented its first 10% layoff. While most executives made uniform cuts, I strategically restructured by eliminating underperforming programs, specifically manual testing, and redirected resources toward continuous integration, a forward-thinking approach that proved highly effective.During my tenure, I led the engineering team to deliver over a dozen products on time and within budget, demonstrating my ability to drive efficiency and innovation in a large public company. My leadership during this critical period was instrumental in stabilizing and positioning Network Appliance for future success.

Milpitas, Ca, Us

Silicon Graphics was one of the most exciting and innovative companies in Silicon Valley, akin to Google in its heyday. It prioritized innovation and empowered employees to create groundbreaking products that dominated markets from Hollywood movie-making to industrial design.I joined SGI as its 600th employee, starting as a summer intern for the CTO. My journey at SGI was thrilling; by the time I left, I was the general manager of a global consulting practice. During my tenure, I patented new techniques in computer graphics and co-invented technologies that became the foundation for Netflix streaming video and TiVo. It was an exhilarating experience that fueled my passion for technology and innovation.SGI, with its strong Hewlett-Packard roots, was an incredible place to learn management and leadership. It championed diversity long before it became a mainstream concept in Silicon Valley, setting an example for companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Intel. My time at SGI was truly the time of my life, immersed in an environment that celebrated and drove technological advancement.

Bsee, Computer Science

Qualified For Phd, Computer Science (Systems)