Worked closely with external field engineers to fine-tune ~50 Databricks Jobs responsible for ingesting/maintaining a sustained 500k records-per-second into a multi-petabyte Delta Lakehouse that will soon power Segment's customer data profiles across all product offerings (Profiles Data Lake).Drove down AWS S3 costs (storage + API requests) for the Profiles Data Lake by 300%.Owned operational readiness and excellence for Profiles Data Lake "go-live", ensuring a resilient Data Platform complete with: real-time systems monitoring via DataDog; custom dashboard panels; Slack alerting; GDPR/CCPA/BCR compliance; PagerDuty integration; & internal documentation/runbooks.Introduced & productionalized concurrent patterns in Scala/Spark allowing multiple tenants/customers to process at the same time; ultimately decreasing job runtimes by 44% on average while increasing cluster worker/executor CPU utilization by 8x on compute-heavy tasks.Assisted in the initial setup of a cloud-to-cloud migration process using Python, Apache Airflow, GCP, AWS [Athena/Glue/MWAA/S3/Lambda/StepFunctions], Scala, and Databricks; ultimately allowing our team to automate our migration & backfill processes.

InfraGreen Farms & Co. "IGF" -- originally envisioned as a nonprofit organization -- is an ambitious AgTech LLC planning to become a certified B-Corp. IGF aims to disrupt food industry middle-men, lower the market prices of raw organic produce, increase sustainability, and elevate food security for urban and surrounding communities via modern vertical farming methods, utilization of existing infrastructure, and implementation of advanced AI.

H/W break while searching for a great fit in my next role. I'm focusing on re-balancing (family, gym, meditation, hobbies, etc) and reflection/journaling of the mistakes I made throughout my career & how I could've handled things differently 🙂Additionally I am working on re-branding myself as I continue to grow as a professional; leading me to proudly announce the 3rd version my portfolio website (see media link)!

Owned the full SDLC of critical-path migration efforts for an at-risk multi-million dollar investment/acquisition, highlights include: moving & validating 50TB of data between IBM Netezza and Snowflake via bespoke PySpark applications designed to be performant & highly cost-effective (<$10k) with zero interruption of live customer traffic; orchestration of cloud-based workflows via ADF & Databricks; the creation of testing frameworks/harnesses; and automation of manual QA processes.Mentored junior & senior colleagues on technical topics such as Spark configuration/tuning; object-oriented & functional paradigm concepts in Python and when/why/how they’re useful; Snowflake performance/cost traps to avoid & optimizations to pursue; solution/software/system design; and engineering principles such as DRY, SOLID, and test-driven development (TDD).Initiated cross-functional collaboration with key decision-makers & stakeholders belonging to several disparate teams within the enterprise to introduce hybrid-cloud capabilities in Azure to pave the way for many future on-premises-to-cloud migrations.Accelerated development & progress of a legacy data warehouse migration project by 8x over the previously failed attempt(s) through strong leadership, communication, & technical skills as well as championing adoption of new channels of communication, ways of working, and best practices.

Glassdoor layoffs 🙁

Led team of 4 engineers to build a proof-of-concept lakehouse architecture using Apache Iceberg, S3 and Apache Spark; highlights from the team’s company-wide Hackathon presentation include (compared to Hive & ORC): ~$700,000 annual AWS savings mainly via reduction in data storage costs; showcasing Iceberg’s promising improvements in functionality/performance (zstd-compressed Parquet); and deep dives & visualizations of Iceberg features such as time travel, hidden partitioning, & schema/partition evolution.Spearheaded efforts to improve the data and ML teams’ Spark, Airflow, and Python development workflows by hosting presentations, advocating for best practices, & alleviating common cross-functional pain points which led to huge boosts in productivity across the overall data team.Designed, developed, tested, & maintained mission-critical, petabyte-scale data pipelines powering executive-level reports & dashboards using technologies such as Spark, Hive, and Airflow; all backed by AWS EMR & S3.

Migrated Garmin’s Java-based Apache Storm applications to Apache Flink which (in conjunction with Apache Kafka) powers real-time fitness & wellness insights as well as dynamic workout coaching for users worldwide; highlights include: achieving 95% increased test coverage, implementing real-time Grafana dashboards that monitor custom StatsD metrics, and configuring automated alerting for maintainability. Reorganized, took full inventory of, & upgraded team’s Java/Spring API’s, Java MapReduce jobs, Git repositories, Jenkins jobs/pipelines, bash scripts, & cron-based schedulers to allow for rapid execution of critical software & security improvements/mandates under tight timelines; ultimately accelerating the pace of the team’s larger initiatives to migrate their on-premises Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) to Cloudera Data Platform (CDP). Owned the big data team’s internal data request/analysis process which utilized technologies such as Scala, Apache Spark, Parquet, AVRO; Protobuf, HDFS, & Apache HBase; all to quickly deliver data-driven decisions to various key company stakeholders with an average of 5 day turnaround. Generated upwards of 10% increased device sales by working with MarCom teams to successfully execute & deliver unique coupon codes and ads for ”up-sell” campaigns that provided targeted savings to specific demographics of Garmin’s user-base (generally active users wearing older device models). Supported customer-facing features by identifying the root cause of escalated customer issues for Garmin Coach & Insights and applying both short-term & long-term fixes.

Built Java-based MDM data pipelines hosted on AWS for a new managed SaaS product offering (LumaSuite Cloud) while collaborating cross-functionally with two separate teams and C-level executives to successfully launch the service from beta to production in under 1 year. Debugged, performed root cause analysis of, and ultimately addressed major performance pain points for SalesPage’s Java (ORM) ELT pipelines; ultimately recorded ~600% mean speed-up (post-fix) which greatly accelerated development & testing cycles to reach project deadlines. Developed a platform-wide fuzzy matching solution in Java and SQL Server that enriched data insights by linking ~15% of unaccounted-for data; this solution achieved a 98.9% match rate on two sets of 1,000,000 records in under 10 seconds through careful implementation of various algorithms such as Levenshtein distance, Soundex, & Metaphone.Implemented efficient bulk data quality & cleansing processes in Java & SQL Server that standardizes data flowing through all ETL pipelines. Drove down the total time of a client’s vital data migration/conversion from ~4 days to ~12 hours by learning Oracle & batch scripting on the fly and automating the largely manual process to an optimized, parallel data process using batch scripts, Oracle, & SQL Server.

An undisclosed friend's Father offered to pay me...quite handsomely for helping tutor her daughter in a graduate level statistics course that I was taking alongside her. I did not decline as a broke college student & this little extra cash flow gave me the motivation to push through that class as it was HARD. We both ultimately did very well in that class and she continues to do well in life.

Long-boarded to work every day and helped Waldo Library IT Services reduce their service ticket queue down to 0 while assisting with hardware expansion efforts consisting of full setup/lockdown/monitoring of a fleet of from Windows PC's.Figured out first-hand why everyone hates printers in IT.Ran & managed the "Emerging Technologies" lab which gave students free access to extremely high-end gaming PC's in addition to the first wave of Oculus VR headsets. Also attended & explored educational aspects such as C# scripting in Unity, video game creation, and medical applications.

"Technology Specialist" i.e. I helped recommend customers products for their individual needs, knowledge levels and use cases... and then sold them those products. Practiced up-selling but never forced it because I didn't personally believe in needlessly pushing extras unless someone truly would benefit from it.Back-to-school week & Black Friday haunt me since.

I still have no idea how to golf.

Picked things up and put things down as directed over a summer as a side gig to pay back some CC debt when I built my first real gaming PC. Moved some high-value furniture/belongings for incredibly wealthy individuals primarily located on the Lake Michigan shoreline, but also sometimes found myself moving stuff for high-end clients in Grand Rapids. You wouldn't believe some of the houses I've seen... they make what's displayed on HGTV look like a joke.

Brand ambassador (1099 - independent contractor) working select events through Mosaic to represent/promote MetroPCS in events around the West Michigan area (Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, etc) but occasionally further away as well.Spoke on the radio once which I was NOT prepared for -- so I freestyled some sales-y stuff off the top of my head about the event and the super awesome phone deals with a call-to-action to "come on down". I still cringe a little reminiscing about it.Attended and promoted MetroPCS at other events such as Faster Horses ticket giveaways via physical retail locations, community celebrations w/ live music, monster truck rallies, food truck rallies, black heritage festivals, beer festivals, & college tailgates. Experiential marketing provided me a lot of fun times.

Margaritas y cervezas!

Want to say somewhere around 80-90% of the entire hotel restaurant, including myself, were laid off at the Hotel's Christmas / New Year's party that I was unable to attend. The owners decided to turn it into an event space rather than a restaurant. I believe the hotel is now under new ownership.