Work Experience

Principal Engineer, Limelight Networks (Dec 2021 - Dec 2022)

Limelight Networks is a top-three worldwide CDN company. I work in "App Ops" building out high-throughput proxy and edge routing infrastructure.

A highly technical field where I work at the intersection of C, Rust, WASM, and TypeScript.

We maintain forks of well-known pieces of software such as Varnish, extensive custom libraries of our own.

I have been most recently overseeing the adding of distributed tracing support, as a crutch to support our limited visibility into our deep stack.

I have had cause to reach for gdb, eBPF and uprobes when diagnosing misbehaving applications where we could not reproduce the issue in the lab.

In my until now short time at Limelight I have undergone two mergers, once as Limelight bought Layer0, the company with whom I interviewed, and again when Limelight acquired Yahoo!'s CDN division, EdgeCast.

My proudest achievements here have been cutting my team's triage time for new customer issues from 10+ days to < 36 hours whilst migrating us to a monorepo architecture which replaced the 13 scattered repositories containing all our co-dependent software. I also championed a monolithic Rust architecture and laid out a roadmap for building some extremely high performance software which would enable us to have both best-in-class developer experience in our SDK whilst also having best-in-class support for WASM and TypeScript on the edge.

We shipped that software more-or-less on-time and helped land a really key customer.

Distinguished Engineer, Stuart.com (Feb 2019 - Dec 2021)

One of the company's most senior engineers who's role developed into management and mentorship.

Polyglot platform with Ruby, Scala, Elixir and Python components.

My role was rooted in the Ruby code-base (as the most central component) with extensive focus on discovery and formalization of our organically grown bounded contexts, and championing improvements to our API boundaries and contracts (both "public" in GraphQL and streaming API designs) and in the more private APIs such as our Kafka/Avro infrastructure. Throughout my time at Staurt I was exposed to, and heavily involved in all areas of the stack, from our data science pipelines (data lake, ETLs, etc), our Ruby stack (Rails, mostly) and our Java & Scala stacks, which was Akka, Kafka, Avro oriented.

My title in this role was principal/distinguished engineer, but I was peered with, and regularly interacting with the engineering directors. I had significant management/oversight responsibilities with people management (covering 5 teams), as the software architecture is intimately entwined with the team topology and management style.

My proudest achievements in this role were being present whilst the engineering team grew out from ~35 people up to ~200 and helping preserve our culture and meet our insane growth targets. As a last mile groceries and fast-food delivery platform the COVID-19 pandemic was like rocket fuel for us. Throughout this time of rapid scaling and growth we always made time for our "brown bag" lunches, for deliberately working on culture as something tangible, and also on really innovative technology projects, most notably I lead, and oversaw a multi-team migration to a GraphQL architecture as a key strategic move designed to help us "break the monolith" and federate our teams' services into one ubiquitous API.

During one leadership change, I also advocated for, and was supported in executing a "blueprinting" (inventory, mapping) of our stack across all technology adjacent teams to help us curate a sensible team, and stakeholder structure. We made heavy use of Simon Brown's C4 Model, and developed some integration between Confluence, and our GitHub repositories, so these typical developer tools became accessible to less-technical stakeholders such as UX/UI and our business counterparts.

Engineering Manager, Mesosphere (Jul 2018 - Feb 2019)

Grew a relatively structureless team from four to ten people and built distinct disciplines within three well defined areas; CLI, Operating System Foundations, and Observability.