Developed a hybrid storage solution on top of cloud hardware to balance performance and persistence concerns for high-traffic data storage. This improved database read performance by ~150%, reduced the complexity of each database cluster, and simplified the backup strategy for each database node. Built additional tooling to automatically recover virtual machines that suffer underlying host failures.Deployed zero-trust infrastructure access software across the entire fleet of Discord servers, replacing a custom server access solution. Worked with the vendor to address bugs and usability concerns. Onboarded employees into the system gradually to reduce the pain to the company as a whole. Documented the architecture of the system and added critical monitoring to minimise downtime. Integrated with SSO using an RBAC model to reduce the difficulty of mapping employees to permissions.

Introduced ScyllaDB into the Discord ecosystem as a replacement for the incumbent primary data store (Apache Cassandra). Scylla's opinionated architecture required in-depth system tuning and smart schema design to maximise performance. Developer education ensured the Discord was using Scylla to its fullest potential while avoiding common pitfalls.Improved Discord's infrastructure management through better Terraform tooling, including automated drift detection and better abstractions over basic building blocks.

Integrated service mesh technologies into Thumbtack's ecosystem, increasing visibility into application performance and providing traffic shaping features previously missing from the infrastructure. Built a control plane for Envoy Proxy that supported service discovery, rate limiting, and metric collection across the fleet of Thumbtack services. Debugged subtle networking issues while rolling out the service mesh in production.Created a new set of AWS virtual networks and supporting software in support of a company-wide infrastructure update. Designed the new setup with the goals of isolating environments (production, staging, etc) and with backwards-compatibility to facilitate migration to the new setup.Built tooling on top of PostgreSQL to provide scrubbed production data to developers in near real time. Leveraged ZFS, Docker, and AWS S3 to stream WAL data, snapshot complete servers, and run individual PG instances with minimal storage cost and in a highly scalable manner.Designed and implemented a canarying system for arbitrary applications, allowing new versions to be rolled out with fine-grained control over the traffic exposed to specific versions. Abstracted system through a script and set of daemons that allow engineers to deploy and rollout changes with simple commands. Integrated this system with the Thumbtack build process to enable automatic rollout of application versions. Customized Nginx configurations to allow for dynamic routing of traffic at the individual request level.Prototyped and deployed a new monitoring and alerting infrastructure. Evaluated multiple technologies and compared performance of production-level workloads, providing evidence to support the final decisions. Codified large parts of the monitoring pipeline, helping to ensure changes are correct and reliable through automated testing and manual reviews. Created standards and practices for recording and analysing metric data.

Successfully re-architected user session data in order to fit the information within a single HTTP cookie. This obviated a costly backend data store, reducing the complexity of the system, freeing engineering time spent on maintenance, and reducing the business cost of running Thumbtack infrastructure.Prototyped and executed infrastructure migration to Amazon Web Services from dedicated machines. This included exploring AWS's SaaS offerings beyond servers, encompassing DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, SQS, and VPC. Assisted in establishing practices around use of these resources and creating tools/libraries to easy their use.Improved customer-professional matching by reevaluating the mechanics used in the Thumbtack marketplace. Increased the accuracy of categorization for pros and consumer requests to better match projects with interested parties through user-facing changes to the professional onboarding and request creation flow. Engaged pros by revisiting the incentives program used to capture disengaged users, taking advantage of historical data and A/B testing new criteria for the program. Raised pro awareness of customer requests by decoupling pro invitations from the notification system, allowing pros to receive all eligible opportunities without oversubscribing users to notifications. Worked directly with the product team to ensure changes were statistically beneficial to the product.

Improved testing ergonomics through test platform modifications, allowing developers to write more effective tests, execute test suites faster, and understand test results with greater clarity, thereby improving overall system reliability and confidence in shipped code.Developed orchestration software to control the Nebula system. Worked with different management components contained within native Linux containers (LXC), controlling them through a central piece of software. Implemented Collectd plugins to visualize physical and virtual machine usage through the Graphite metric graphing system, allowing developers to easily identify when and where problems occur in the system.Redesigned the company's disk image building system, bringing it from an needlessly complicated Python module to a single Makefile. Massively improved performance by removing redundant operations and enabling partial / incomplete builds (utilizing Make's built-in dependency models), drastically reducing build times for many system components.

Spent the summer as a member of the Mobile Development group, largely tasked with producing and maintaining internal iOS applications for use by Merrill Lynch financial advisers.Prototyped an internal file storage and sharing application designed to hold sensitive documents for all of an adviser's clients. Leveraged existing Merrill Lynch infrastructure to create a secure and robust environment for the application. Further implemented automated iOS testing through the Xcode IDE with the primary goal of removing the burden of trivial testing from both developers and the quality assurance teams.Deployed an OSQA (Q&A forum) server for the Mobile Development group in order to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between teams. Integrated system with the company's custom single sign-on platform.

Tasked with overseeing campers continuously for eight straight weeks. This involved working with other counselors and staff to monitor camper's health, plan and teach activities, and resolve any personal and interpersonal issues between campers.