Staff Software Engineer at Squarespace. Backend product engineer with over 9 years experience, specialized in microservice architecture and aligning technical direction to product vision.
Experience
2023 — Now
2023 — Now
Technical lead for a group of 15 engineers, who own both the Email Campaigns and Contacts products.
Coordinated with Staff+ peers on cross-org projects to build technical alignment.
Authored and led the implementation of a technical strategy, to separate user identity and audience segmentation into independent services. This improved query response time for heavy queries from ~60s to <1s, improved failure domains, and derisked continued development of additional marketing segmentation. While implementing, collaborated with Product to clarify product vision to unblock technical decisions.
Advised the teams I supported on crafting and prioritizing technical investments in our stack during planning cycles, including building out load testing, refactoring to centralize shared functionality, and migrating patterns to adopt established golden paths.
Currently mentoring a Senior II engineer who is on track to be promoted to Staff
Panelist on internal career growth panel for new grads, and panelist on public Fairygodboss webinar on career paths for women in STEM.
2019 — 2023
2019 — 2023
Backend engineer on the Email Campaigns product team, working on the email delivery pipeline.
Lead Mongodb sharding of email engagement collections by introducing a shard key and updating all access patterns to include the shard key. This allowed us over time to scale to over 14B event objects over 9 shards for our largest collection and makes it possible for us to continue adding shards in a scalable manner.
Scoping of second ESP vendor for Campaigns to ensure reliability of the product in event of a vendor outage, which could support requirements for email sender whitelabeling on behalf of customers. This has allowed us to dynamically divert traffic in the case of a single vendor outage and keep the Campaigns product available.
Through data exploration, found a low lift way to improve email deliverability by opting recipients out of marketing emails after repeated soft delivery failures. This decreased our bounce rate by an estimated 15%, which positively impacted our platform sender reputation.
2021 — 2023
2021 — 2023
Managed team of 4 software engineers working on the Contacts product. Promoted one engineer from Senior I to Senior II, and crafted a progression plan for another one who was promoted the following year.
Developed a multi-year technical strategy for the Contacts product which was reviewed and adopted by engineering leadership. Worked in partnership with product to align the technical strategy to the Product vision.
Managed modernization of recaptcha integration on Website sign-up forms from recaptcha V2 to enterprise invisible recaptcha V3 and enabled recaptcha V3 on all existing 1.9M sign-up forms, improving security and the quality of data collected.
2017 — 2019
2017 — 2019
Greater New York City Area
Worked on the beta version of the Member Sites feature. Combination of a green field project on the product side, while working within legacy code of the existing ecosystem.
2016 — 2017
2016 — 2017
Madison, Wisconsin Area
Software developer with the Care Everywhere team on database code, web server code, and internal tools. Part of the core development team for the Care Everywhere image exchange project from design through execution for standards based image exchange between healthcare organizations.
Worked on design and development for bug fixes and improvements for the 2017 and 2018 Epic releases.
Direct experience interacting with end users in hospitals to gather feedback on UX needs.
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
2010 — 2015
UCLA
Bachelor’s Degree
2006 — 2010