Walker Ward Email & Phone Number

United States

Lehi, Utah, Us

Lehi, Utah, Us

- Led generative AI initiatives at Podium, including the development and release of complex conversational agents, benchmarking frameworks, fine-tuned models, natural language search, and an in-house experimentation platform for rapid iteration of LLM powered features. - Led the technical strategy and architecture for 8 teams of 50+ engineers as an Architect and Technical Leader. Collaborated with product and engineering directors to define Podium's roadmap, guiding system design decisions and leading complex, business-critical initiatives.- Optimized and redesigned CI pipelines and processes, reducing lead time from 52 to 9 minutes, cutting costs by 40%, and mitigating flakey E2E tests from 40% down to 1%.- Implemented a codemod framework for Elixir that successfully drove the mass adoption of reliability best practices across 100+ services, resulting in improved system stability and reduced downtime.- Authored architectural design records (ADRs) and contributed to the implementation of idempotent queue processing, a rules engine, monolith to microservice migrations, an audit logging rewrite, several graphQL APIs, third-party API vetting/integration, and the design of several new services. - Worked with teams across the engineering organization to set and achieve reliability SLOs, with service-specific targets related to response latency, response success rate, and uptime.

Lehi, Utah, Us

- Designed and implemented a custom query DSL that allowed downstream applications to dynamically query document data using complex nested AND/OR/NOT logic.- Wrote an event tracking library that enabled teams to easily track user journeys across more than a dozen front-end applications.- Revamped Podium's engineering interview process to raise the talent bar, evaluate candidates objectively, and improve the candidate experience.

Lehi, Utah, Us

- Designed SMS marketing architecture optimized for durability and high-throughput processing that required a challenging combination of at-most-once and at-least-once guarantees.- Designed and implemented several high-throughput Kafka workloads including a CSV processing pipeline capable of ingesting 1m+ rows in seconds.- Drove cross-functional efforts for a hyper-growth SMS marketing product that was released publicly on a short 28-day deadline. This product went on to produce millions of dollars worth of value for both Podium and its customers.

Los Angeles, California, Us

- Wrote fault-tolerant image processing services using Node.js that leveraged Fargate Spot Instances, reducing costs by up to 70% compared to Fargate pricing.- Designed and implemented a multi-environment CI/CD pipeline that was deployed 10,000+ times during the first year of product development.- Wrote file uploader which leveraged parallelism and direct S3 transfer acceleration to match the upload performance of IBM Aspera, reducing licensing costs significantly.- Reduced mono-repo build times from ~1 hour down to ~7 minutes by implementing internal tooling that used folder hashing to track code changes across builds.- Led a team of three software engineers in scrum processes.

Los Angeles, California, Us

- Implemented an on-demand image processing service that leveraged Lambda@Edge to dynamically generate thumbnails and reduce overall costs of long-term storage.- Developed a gallery viewer web app using Ember.js that performed infinite scroll at 60 FPS for collections of 10k+ high-resolution images. - Reduced latency for static assets by 72% and improved content security through optimizing signature calculations within authorization/authentication flow.

Orem, Utah, Us

- Improved queue processing throughput by 223% through implementing child-process spawning techniques that added no additional compute costs.- Wrote ETL program that synced inventory data from an on-premise legacy system with a SaaS-based e-commerce store, providing up-to-date faceted search results.- Built a globally distributed low-latency messaging system that provided a competitive edge by fetching data near physical servers and aggregating data for central processing.- Developed web scraper that extracted and stored millions of data points and cleansed data using cloud-based big data tools (BigQuery & Dataflow).- Optimized PageSpeed grades from F to A for highly trafficked sites.- Met every deadline through the successful completion of over 30 projects, many of which required the development of new skills.

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

Finance

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