Curriculum Vitae

Education ⇧

M.Eng Computer Science, Cornell University, College of Engineering Ithaca, NY 2012
  • Emphasis in information retrieval and cloud computing, with coursework in AI & NLP.
  • Capstone project was a scalable, gossip-based, distributed Python application messaging framework
B.S. Computer Science Wheaton College Wheaton, IL 2010
  • Studies in Writing, Public Speaking, and Economics

Employment ⇧

Carta New York, NY

Engineering Manager May 2022 - present

Simon Data, Inc New York, NY

Simon is a state-of-the-art SaaS platform for modern marketers to gather, operationalize, automate, and report on their data. We develop a full data pipeline for top-tier B2C companies (incl WeWork, Venmo, Airbnb, OpenTable, Blue Apron, & Casper). I was employee #9, and helped craft many of the systems in use today.

Engineering Manager, Streaming Data 2021-2022
Data Security Engineer Jan 2019 - 2021
  • Focusing on the security side of Simon. GDPR, privacy, data retention and governance, threat modeling, team authorization & permissions, phishing prevention, SOC2 compliance, web application security.
Senior Data Engineer March 2016 - Jan 2019
  • Architected core schema/metadata design for entire Simon ETL process.
  • Ran successful recruiting process to hire and mentor a team of top tier jr implementation engineers.
  • Coordinated effort to triple our data pipe workload over holiday season and delivered successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns.
  • Build numerous robust API integrations for Simon’s 3rd party modules including Mailchimp, SendGrid, Responsys, Twilio, Salesforce CRM, ZenDesk, and ExactTarget.
  • Modernized and managed Hadoop & Spark frameworks, packages, and patterns in batch data pipe processes. Designed realtime pipeline on AWS Lambda for abandoned cart messaging.
  • Managed rotating on-call responsibility, bug triage process, and deployments. Hosted regular ’brown bag’ sessions on engineering topics like test design & security best practices.

Intent, Inc New York, NY

Data Engineer / Machine Learning Engineer August 2013 - March 2016
  • Spearheaded project to bridge visitor profile data on major ecommerce sites (Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, Kayak.com, etc. . . ) across devices using AWS DynamoDB, improving data integrity in the face of increased cookie loss.
  • Wrote aggregation and computational Clojure on Hadoop (Cascalog/Cascading) jobs & productionized Apache Spark on AWS EMR for machine learning.
  • Isolated portions of data infrastructure as Clojure microservices to enable greater scalability.
  • Pushed initiatives to improve & scale our JavaScript partner tagging integration APIs to collect and consume hundreds of gigabytes per day. Expanded OLAP capabilities loading into Vertica.
  • Developed a robust predictive modeling platform for our massive online travel dataset. Expanded feature vector with domain expertise and applied multiple algorithms (linear & logistic regressions, and others).
Software Engineer July 2012 - August 2013
  • Java, Clojure, Ruby, and Javascript development. Using big data to shape ecommerce decisioning. We are fully unit+integration tested, agile, and deploy daily.
  • Refactored massive portions of Rails test environment (Rspec, Cucumber)
  • Evolved large Rails app for managing client configuration.
  • Contributed to continual Java adserver performance tuning
  • Built out a simple, robust report delivery system for clients.
  • Vertica cluster database integration, coupling it with ActiveRecord and integrating it into an OpenStack build cluster

First Trust Portfolios, LP Wheaton, IL

Software Developer June 2010 - August 2011
  • Developed massive desktop Delphi client-server applications to manage UIT pricing and market research algorithms.

One Communications Corp Rochester, NY

Application Programmer May 2009 - August 2009
  • Designed and implemented ASP.NET C# dashboard systems. Learned everything from the ground up and delivered a couple web applications to display key metrics.

Wheaton College Wheaton, IL

Teacher's Assistent / Lab Assistant August 2008 - December 2008
  • Graded proofs and taught class sessions on algorithms and functional progrogramming. Onboarded new students unfamiliar with UNIX systems.

Previous

Computer Programming Instructor August 2008 - December 2008
  • Developed my own course curriculum and taught a successful "Introduction to Programming with Java" course to several high school students.
Contract Web Developer 2004 - 2008
  • Customized Wordpress and delivered custom PHP/MySQL sites for local professionals and businesses.
Sailing Instructor 2003 - 2006

Awards & Honors ⇧

  • Award for Excellence in Computer Science, Wheaton College, 2010.
  • 12th Place, Midwest ACM Programming Competition, 2009 (out of 140 regional teams).
  • First place, ACCA Programming Competition (Chicagoland Colleges) in February 2009

Board and Advisory Positions ⇧

MESA Charter High School

Secretary of the Board of Trustees November 2018 - current

Maintain the minutes of the meetings, recruit new board members, and maintain data and documents for the board.

Member of Finance Committee July 2015 - current

Review the budgets, salaries, and approve larger purchases. The school is very well run and we project conservatively and run under budget every year.

Cornell Tech

Startup Studio Crit Advisor 2016-2018

Advise and coach masters students on products and startup ideas.

Speaking Engagements ⇧

  • Technical Foundations of Vertica (Presented at Intent Media, Inc, 2013)
  • The Fun of Connection: Building Abstractions in Data Systems (Midwest.io, 2015)
  • Convex Hull Finding Algorithms (Presented as academic research for an interview, 2012)

Publications ⇧

Open Source ⇧

Just a few selected contributions.

  • Schema Transform - Primary author

    A flexible method for transforming Avro schemas in Clojure.

  • Flambo - Contributor

    Clojure DSL for Apache Spark. I contributed to a few new APIs to fill out the available features.

Volunteering ⇧

  • Led a volunteer team to teach CoffeeScript & Scratch for introductory game programming to 9-11th grade students at MESA.
  • Taught basic programming in Racket using Bootstrap (from Google) for Citizen Schools at Global Tech Prepara- tory in East Harlem, NY.