Experience
2024 — Now
New York, United States
2020 — 2024
2020 — 2024
New York, New York, United States
2018 — 2020
New York, New York
Acquired by Snap, Inc. in September 2020
2015 — 2018
2015 — 2018
New York, NY
As the lead of the Search team, I contribute to the open-source geocoding engine, developed in-house, called Pelias (https://github.com/pelias). This engine also powers the popular Mapzen Search hosted service, which my team is responsible for operating.
• Led a distributed team through several major successful release cycles, including 1.0 launch of the Mapzen Search API
• Maintain hands-on involvement in engineering through code reviews, design consultations, coding, and investigation/debugging/resolution of issues
• Championed a successful shift to microservices architecture and containerization of the engine using Docker/Kubernetes/AWS
• Oversaw integration and optimal usage of key open-data sources, such as OpenStreetMap, OpenAddresses, and Who’s on First
• Formulate team’s quarterly/yearly goals and objectives with a strong focus on long-term product strategy
• Pushed for company-wide visibility and analytics through customizable dashboards, log analysis, and automated reports
• Improve team and company culture by strengthening relationships, facilitating effective communication, and encouraging collaboration
• Build and maintain relationships with external clients and partners
• Significantly grew open-source community engagement with emphasis on thorough documentation, inclusive and welcoming communication, and transparency
• Steered adoption of agile development process
• Instrumented acceptance/regression test suites and set up robust automated CI (continuous integration) flows
• Mentor and champion each team member through regular 1:1s, direct and consistent feedback, and thoughtful/relevant assignments
• Represent Mapzen at technical conferences through numerous talks, panels, and technical workshops
2012 — 2014
2012 — 2014
New Hope, PA
Hired to implement several high-performance services in C/C++. Once that work was completed, I switched focus to node.js and web API implementation. Through all of my projects, I heavily employed Test Driven Development, unit testing, and acceptance testing. I mentored and encouraged others to learn new software engineering concepts, tools, and technologies. I also put a lot of emphasis on company culture and strove to contribute to a collaborative and inclusive environment by organizing and presenting in various clubs and MeetUps.
• Developed high-performance services in C/C++
• Implemented high-throughput backend API servers in node.js, using technologies/protocols such as: mqtt, socket-io, RPC, REST, express.js / restify.js
• Setup internal npm server to manage proprietary node.js modules
• Implemented consumers for RabbitMQ in C/C++, PHP, Python, and node.js
• Employed various data storage solutions using combinations of redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CouchDB, memcached
• Used Vagrant and Chef to create virtual environments for use throughout the development process
• Continuously implemented and pushed for unit testing and test driven development, as well as acceptance/integration testing
• Testing frameworks/tools used regularly: Cucumber, mocha, should, phpunit
• Technologies used regularly: jenkins, gerrit, rundeck, sensu, newrelic, graphite
• Organized and ran Book Club, which focused on IT books related to the craft of Software Engineering
• Co-organized and presented at the Bucks County Tech MeetUp
Education
Drexel University
Bachelor's degree
1997 — 2001
Drexel University
Master's degree in Software Engineering
1997 — 2001