Staff Software Engineer with 10+ years building distributed systems at scale. Technical leader with a track record of driving org-wide engineering quality -- 60x MTBI improvement, test coverage from <1% to 60% -- while delivering measurable business impact through cost reduction, performance optimization, and cross-functional initiative ownership. Expert in C#, Go, Python, and AWS, with deep experience in event-driven architecture, real-time data pipelines, and ML-based recommendation systems.
> Skills
Go
C#
Python
C
Java
Rust
SQL
PHP
AWS (Lambda, SQS, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, RDS, ECS)
Docker
Terraform
MySQL
PostgreSQL
ElasticSearch/OpenSearch
Kafka
RabbitMQ
CI/CD
CloudWatch Monitoring
Container Orchestration
Infrastructure as Code
Agile/Scrum
Distributed Systems
Microservices Architecture
Event-Driven Architecture
System Design
REST APIs
> Experience
Built In | Staff Software Engineer
Mar 2022 - Present · 4 yrs
Remote · Full-time
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Built In | Staff Software Engineer
Mar 2022 - Present · 4 yrs
Remote · Full-time
Staff Software Engineer
Mar 2025 - Present · 1 yr- Owned end-to-end an event-driven advertising system across 5 services, driving 15% increase in annual deals and contributing to the company's first profitable year
- Migrated payment processors from Authorize.Net to Stripe, modernizing subscription model and doubling profitability of self-service jobs
- Established observability and reliability foundations: introduced metric storage, automated alerting, integration tests in CI/CD, and queue-based decoupling of fragile systems -- reducing MTTR of critical systems by up to 70x, from 48-72 hours to under 1 hour
- Identified and resolved system-wide memory leak, reducing compute costs by 40% annually
- Established Staff Guild driving cross-team standards: introduced code ownership and integration test coverage, drove test coverage from <1% to 60%, improved MTBI from 1-2 incidents/week to 1 per quarter+ (~60x)
- Designed and deployed automated spam moderation system, eliminating ~600 fraudulent job postings and 10-15 fake companies daily across a 40k job/day ingestion pipeline
- Led .NET 10 upgrade across multiple repos and Lambda infrastructure
- Technologies: C#, Go, Python, AWS, Terraform, Docker
Senior Software Engineer II
Mar 2024 - Mar 2025 · 1 yr- Increased job email engagement by 60% through KNN-based recommendation system
- Accelerated email generation from 3 days to <2 hours for 1M+ users via AWS Lambdas
- Reduced infrastructure costs by 50% through autoscaling and resource optimization
- Further optimized job ingestion by 6x (~4h to <40 minutes) despite doubling events through cluster isolation, process scale out, improved text parsing, and earlier filtering
- Technologies: C#, Python, Terraform, Golang, AWS
Senior Software Engineer
Mar 2023 - Mar 2024 · 1 yr- Accelerated job ingestion 6x (23.5h to <4h) through algorithmic optimization and distributed processing
- Led design and implementation of a scalable event-based email newsletter system across multiple teams using AWS (S3, SNS, SQS, Lambda, SES, ECS, RDS, ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, Kinesis)
- Improved batch email processes, reducing recovery time from 42 hours to 6 hours and SE involvement from 4 days per month to ~1 hour
- Decreased deployment time by 3x via standardized CI/CD pipelines and testing
- Technologies: C#, Python, Terraform, Golang, AWS
Software Engineer
Mar 2022 - Mar 2023 · 1 yr- Modernized automated ATS import system using Kafka, SQS, and C# handling up to 500,000 jobs per day, supporting over 25 different ATSs
- Improved scalability and reduced total resource use by up to 87% during non-burst times
- Developed reusable Terraform modules, reducing deployment time from days to hours, and performed several major version upgrades
- Improved legacy PHP application maintainability by introducing first unit tests and feature flags, reducing bug tickets by 50%
- Technologies: C#, PHP, Kafka, SQS, AWS, Terraform
First Trust Portfolios | Software Engineer
Mar 2019 - Feb 2022 · 3 yrs
Wheaton, IL · Hybrid
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First Trust Portfolios | Software Engineer
Mar 2019 - Feb 2022 · 3 yrs
Wheaton, IL · Hybrid
Software Engineer
Mar 2019 - Feb 2022 · 3 yrs- Supported 3-tier applications dealing with sensitive financial data
- Automated trade entry processes, reducing manual workload by 30% and TRACE reporting to seconds
- Built trade reporting system enabling desk to catch errors before client delivery, eliminating hours of manual review monthly
- Guided a high risk, eventless database vendor migration from Informix to SQL Server that concluded with no issues
- Optimized IVORS process achieving ~50% reduction in disk usage with zero errors, identifying duplicated records between reports
- Designed reliable ETL system for adding trades from csv/spreadsheets
- Mentored 3 interns and new engineers on service-oriented architecture principles
- Technologies: C#, .NET, SQL Server
Omron Automotive Electronics | Software Engineer
Sep 2017 - Mar 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos
St. Charles, IL · Full-time
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Omron Automotive Electronics | Software Engineer
Sep 2017 - Mar 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos
St. Charles, IL · Full-time
Software Engineer
Sep 2017 - Mar 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos- Developed and owned embedded C software for a door switch module, safety critical parking brake module, and differential module using LIN/CAN communication protocols, including LIN 2.0 and J2602 compliant code
- Tuned and improved embedded software time and space performance by up to 50%
- Provided continuous unit, integration, and quality assurance testing
- Created Python CLI tools automating report generation, saving 10+ hours weekly
- Technologies: C, Embedded Systems
> Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
2017Northern Illinois University
> Projects
Job Search Embedder
Custom embedding engine using n-gram tokenization and vector similarity for semantic job matching.
Self-Hosted Infrastructure
Personal cluster that hosts trippw.com, runs analytics, and runs several daemons that keep me up to date on RSS feeds, plus a self-hosted LLM.
Rust Meeting Recorder
Audio daemon written in Rust and Go that records my meetings, storing transcripts in a database and vector database using a go service orchestration -- used by my self-hosted LLM agent to track tasks, performance, and provide further insights.