Zach Hauser Email & Phone Number

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

San Francisco, California, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

While at Twilio, I worked in the Platform organization, which provides the tools and services that enable every Product Engineering team to develop and operate their systems at scale. Over 4.5 years, I worked on nearly every element of the platform, building a wide repertoire of context, technical knowledge, and cross-company relationships.-----I had long stints on two teams:• Observability: logs, metrics, events, and traces — and insights from them all! We owned a mix of in-house systems and SAAS solutions, working primarily to ensure their value for incident response and prevention, and secondarily for capacity planning, debugging, business insights, engineer onboarding, security, and compliance. • Compute: VMs, containers, and Kubernetes clusters. We kept one foot in the past and one in the future, actively developing both the battle-tested systems that orchestrated tens of thousands of VMs and the modern Kubernetes platform gradually supplanting them.-----Due to my broad knowledge base and my ability to ramp up quickly, I was often tapped for temporary transfers to teams that needed urgent support:• Service Mesh: building a custom service mesh based on Envoy Proxy. My full-time stint on this team ended in late 2018, but I remained a subject matter expert on our highly-available, performance-critical service discovery system until I left Twilio, acting as an internal consultant for major changes and incidents.• Application Bootstrapping: automating the creation process of new microservices, promoting best practices and eliminating tedious work. Our system created scaffold codebases and automatically integrated them with everything from observability and monitoring tools to continuous delivery pipelines.• Platform Access: developing self-service systems for managing firewalls, IAM policies, secrets, AWS accounts, VPCs, and network primitives.-----[𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘸]

San Francisco, California, Us

[𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘷𝘦]Some projects I'm especially proud of:• Redesigning our log aggregation system (~1 PB logs/month) to meet the GDPR compliance deadline and avoid a regulatory fine of $10M+. I worked with stakeholders across the company (from Legal, Security, Architecture, IT, Product, and Engineering) to build consensus on the requirements for data retention, access control, and usability. Concurrently, I designed a specification for our internal customers to manage their log stream configurations, and built the orchestration engine that automatically converged the log aggregation system's many components (across AWS and GCP) to match those configurations.• Delivering foundational components of our Envoy service mesh, which was a key requirement for Twilio's effort to attain HIPAA compliance and unlock the enormous healthcare market. I built a bidirectional GRPC streaming interface to link Twilio's in-house service discovery system with Envoy (reducing service discovery update latency by an order of magnitude), designing a method that allowed its gradual rollout with zero customer impact. Other contributions included learning Terraform to stand up control plane infrastructure across ~20 VPCs, and driving dogfooding of the new service mesh across internal Platform services.• Contributing significantly to the multi-year effort to decommission our monolithic AWS accounts and move to a multi-account model (for scalability, security, and developer productivity). Highlights: (1) I rewrote key parts of our legacy compute orchestration system to allow automated onboarding of any number of accounts/VPCs. (2) Under a looming deadline, I leveraged cross-company contacts to build quick consensus on an efficient alternative solution that enabled network connectivity to the common data pipeline.[𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘸]

San Francisco, California, Us

[𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘷𝘦]• Developing a tech talk that introduced early-in-career engineers to the concept of "service-to-service communication" and its fundamental importance in microservice architecture. We discussed concepts such as service discovery, load balancing, and service meshes — and the problems they solve — from first principles. I delivered this talk several times over the course of a couple years, iteratively improving the deck and speaker notes until other engineers were able to present it as well. The talk consistently received top reviews from audiences, and we ultimately recorded it for the company's internal education platform.• Launching and stewarding a working group for the common API infrastructure via which most Platform services are accessed by internal customers, which previously had no real owner. The working group drove improvements to security, reliability, and developer productivity for this set of foundational shared services — and also provided a forum for inter-team knowledge sharing.-----Some technologies I worked with at Twilio: • lots of Java and Python; a little bit of a bunch of other languages• some Javascript, Typescript, React• cgroups, Docker, Kubernetes• Chef, Terraform• Datadog, fluentd, OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry, Rollbar• Envoy Proxy, haproxy, nginx• DNS• AWS DynamoDB, EC2, ECS, ELB, IAM, Kinesis, Lambda, S3, StepFunctions, VPC• GCP App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, IAM, Kubernetes Engine• mysql, redis

Claremont, California, Ca, Us

Mentored students one-on-one and in small groups, covering core classes (introductory object-oriented programming, introductory functional programming, and upper-level programming languages theory).I certainly helped with a lot of coursework, but best of all was when I was able to get a tricky core concept to really click for someone. I enjoy teaching and I loved this job. (Except for the grading — nobody likes grading. Fortunately, I made this a little better for our group of TAs with some automation, replacing a tedious manual grading process with a script.)

San Francisco, California, Us

Developed a Slack chatbot that aided in incident response by automatically providing insight on customer impact for on-call engineers (often before they even got to their laptops!). I worked with the Platform Observability team, which I later returned to full-time, as they developed a new log aggregation system for Twilio. The chatbot I built served a variety of use cases (though incident response was the most impactful), and helped prove out and inform the design of the log aggregation system itself. It won the "Greatest Internal Impact" award at Twilio's internal Hackathon that fall, and for better or for worse, was still in active use when I left the company in 2022. Also, I think it might have the dubious distinction of being the first service at Twilio launched into production (nominally) on Kubernetes.

New York, Ny, Us

Designed and built a reverse proxy server that cached, tweaked, and replayed backend responses in an extremely unreliable staging environment, helping make automated UI testing of the mobile app viable and eliminating 30% of build failures.I learned a ton from a talented group of developers that Amex had acqui-hired as the core of an "internal innovation" office in Palo Alto, focused on the mobile app. They handed me a real problem — their inability to usefully conduct automated UI testing due in large part to an absurdly unstable set of staging backends they did not own — and gave me the support I needed to solve it. I also learned to write a comprehensive unit testing suite for the reverse proxy server itself, which allowed safe and frequent redeployments to Amazon EC2.

Computer Science (Major) & Classics (Minor)

Education record

Education record